Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/5/25 Matt Williams on Taiwan, Nukes, War Crimes and Ukraine

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Scott sits down with Australian military analyst and Afghan war veteran Matt Williams for a long interview. They cover the potential for a war over Taiwan, Australia’s military strengths and vulnerabilities, the future of nuclear proliferation, the West’s war crime hypocrisy, the state of the war in Ukraine and much more.   Matt is an Australian Army veteran, independent journalist, and content creator. He served in the Australian Infantry with the 7th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment from 2014-2021 and was awarded a Queen’s Order of Australia Medal. Since 2022 he has worked as an independent war correspondent and analyst. Subscribe to his YouTube Channel. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated; Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archive. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and x at scott horton show good day legends and welcome to uh the scott horton show and also um kind of a overlapping episode with my good friend here uh matt willie oem as he's known uh the great australian afghan war veteran

and war analyst, expert, especially on the war in Ukraine. So, welcome. That's given me too much credit. But, mate, thank you for having me. I guess I should say, howdy, legends. Absolutely. Welcome. So, first of all, big announcement.

I saw Willie Nelson again last night. It was great. And also, Bob Dylan, we're celebrating the 4th of July. Man, it was a great day. Hey, 4th of July, bad day to be British, but good day to be American. That's right. And I don't know how you Aussies feel about it, but you guys never did declare independence, huh? You're still part of the common law.

Hey, don't bring that up. Don't bring that up. See, I always talk about, I'd like to do that, but then get nuclear weapons. I always say if I was an Australian dictator, it's the only way to do it. They're independent, man. You need H-bombs. Wow. Ask him, he'll tell you.

Well, the thing is, at least tritium-boasted. Well, I say this is if Australia is never going to have the latent military power. potential power to fend off our neighbours. And if Australia, like, at the end of the day, like, you know, I love America, but we have a signature on a bit of paper that says to come and defend us, if someone's knocking on the border, I want that ultimate deterrence. And I think it's easy for Americans to sit around and go, other nations shouldn't have nuclear weapons whilst you've got a massive arsenal of weapons.

And if you're a country like Australia that is completely reliant on country like America, actual defence when we have neighbours. Now, they're still a sea in between us, but, like, even Indonesia, 200 million people. Very friendly, but you don't know in the future. And then, of course, China, you know, we're not actually, if they land, we always say it's in the military, if they land, we're fucked. We need to stop them from ever landing if that were to, if that were to happen. Couldn't you just throw spiders and stuff out there?

Well, to be honest, this, you may not actually know this, but this is one of the military plans in Australia is everything we do, we're not throwing spiders at them, but everything we do is, of course, was aimed at fighting the Russians, you know, Cold War era, Soviet stuff, but now, of course, it's all targeted towards China, is if there was to be a military invasion of Australia,

by whoever, is once they land, which it will be a landing in the north, is to basically just to trit them down as they move to the south and the southeast because it's got so far. It's like, okay, land, now you've got, you know, 2,000 miles, I'll go, of desert. Good luck. And we're just going to have Ragtag guerrilla groups striking oil tankers at, like, in trucks, good luck getting a tank from Darwin to Melbourne, like through the middle

of fucking, it's a difficult drive non-war time. And that's the reason we try and that we do. Makes Afghanistan look like Kansas. Well, yeah, yeah, and we're bringing stuff across oceans to get here and we'll just to treat you down on the way. That is why Australian infantry do long range, smaller team patrols. That's the reason. You don't really perceive any kind of threat from China beyond just the hypothetical competition. So I've tried to use the word competition instead of threat. Now, competition can be taken as threat, but it may be different from like a military threat.

So China is a threat to America because it's competitive. with America, because they are a competing global power. But does that come with threats? Or you can interpret a threat from it. But is it, are they doing it on purpose to have military action? I don't believe so. China's history doesn't show that either. So just because something's a threat, it can be good business is not a threat.

Coca-Cola releasing a product that competes or undercuts Pepsi is a threat to Coca-Cola or is a threat to Pepsi, but that doesn't mean that it was specifically done to be a threat. And I talk about this with B-Y-D, like vehicles, the electric vehicles, being cheaper and having some government funding from the Chinese Communist Party, who I'm not a supporter of, but that is a market threat to Tesla.

That's not a strategic military action of like, that's a declaration of war. No, it's not. It's good business, and good business is not, you know, roll and tanks across someone's border. And that's a lot of what America perceive, in their 2025 strategic review, a lot of what America perceives as Chinese strategic anti-American action, I say it's good business. America won't export now and work with China on chips and AI and this and that. So then you're saying, well, they're developing their own AI as a threat.

They're developing their own AI because that's what you do. If I was a country with a billion people and $40 trillion as a GDP, you know, a in purchasing power parity, I'd be doing that too. What do you want the Chinese to do? Go back to, like, like, what do we expect them to do? The same thing as us is to move forward on stuff and deterrence. So I try to use the word competition from China and competition, you know, Mayor Shimer would talk about in the tragedy of great power politics, competition can breed then military reactions and politics by the means, of course, witsian ideas,

it's going to get messy. All right. Well, so the big rub, of course, is Taiwan. So talk to me all about that. I am in two minds about Taiwan. There's the military aspect of, is it going to be taken militarily? Or will then the Chinese use

strategic patience, as they have always used? and eventually it will Taiwan will become less and less and less important to America as it already is becoming less important and they'll be able to take it with much less resistance and friction. Potentially, I don't,

I think China is looking over in the war in Europe and going, hey, this can have really bad effect. Maybe let's just wait. Let's just wait 50 years. And this is one of the, One of the things about a country like China is we, when I say we, I mean, Western democratic states, and we've got four-year terms to make shit happen. And if that doesn't, well, you don't know what's happening.

You and I have no idea what our countries are going to look like in four years. Someone could get in and holy New Yorkers right now have had whoever that communist bloody bloke get in. And if you're an investor in New York, housing investor, your whole life has got flipped upside down. Where China moves on, you know, I'm not agreeing with. where they, where their trajectory is, but it's very clear if you're in, if you're in the Politburo, you know where you're probably going to be in 50 years. So they can just keep moving. And I think, yeah.

So, Kyle Goldstein says that they have clearly built a naval capability to invade Taiwan. And they've, uh, their regulations have a merchant. Well, I guess what he was saying was they have from, from where they were coming from, they didn't have anything like that 20 years ago. and that they built up clearly enough, I guess he says. And then, you know, he also emphasizes that their merchant marine is all based on regulations where all those can be converted to troops. Yeah, their merchant navy is unbelievable.

America's merchant navy is one of the biggest things, which is in absolute tactics. You know, when I asked him about it, because, you know, he reads all the trade papers in Chinese and everything. Like, he's a really brilliant guy. He knows all of this in great detail. And I think the way he put it was he didn't see anything. specifically in the politics, saying that the Politburo has decided this is an emergency and we want to move on Taiwan as soon as possible. But look at the size of that Navy, man.

It's for something. Oh, yeah, it's something. And it really depends because there's so many ways to do it, too. But it's going to be unbelievably costly. Like, at the end of the day, to take Taiwan, militarily speaking, from an infantryman's background, if people don't know me, I was an infantryman. I was going to ask you all about that, but we skipped a head. No, man, we can get into that.

We're going to talk about Afghanistan a little bit. You are going to lose massive, you're going to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. You are just going to. And you were going to have cargo ships packed the soldiers. Because you just need to get people onto the beaches. You need to get people there. You cannot, this is one of the biggest reasons I criticize

a lot of Ukrainian military actions at the moment. In the frame here. Is a lot of it is focused on strategic victories. and having losses on Russia rather than tactical victories. Now, you need both, but Ukraine is so focused on, like, drones that they've forgotten about the infantrymen. And you're like, no, the end of the day, the infantrymen is what sees and hold ground.

You know one will ever win a war. We can talk about Iran later. You will never win a war just off strategic strikes to seize and hold and change whatever. Taiwan's the same. You're going to just have to get a million men. You're just going to have to get a million men there. And that's why people refer to it.

You've probably heard this term as the million man swim. is how are you getting just a million men onto Taiwan? And at the end of the day, the way to do that is just keep pushing them forward, but you were going to have cargo ships packed with men, 15,000 men, literally standing shoulder to shoulder, you're going to have them sink. You're going to have a torpedo or a drone or whatever or a beck, hit one of those and you're just going to have a sink a ship with 15,000 men on it. You know, you have a cargo tanker full of got.

Like, it's crazy. and I think that the Chinese are, you know, I think that they, obviously they want Taiwan and I think that they will make a move in some way. I'm just not convinced by the 2027 timeline that people have given. Maybe it'll be proven vastly incorrect, but we've seen Russia's difficulties crossing a paddock land border into a neighbouring country. Right. And this, anybody of water is the biggest problem with military.

Any body of water. Although the Ukrainians are also being resupplied by land from the Alliance to their west. And they won't be blockaded. Taiwan is 7,000 miles from San Diego, right. And how confident are we, realistically, that America is going to start sinking Chinese Navy ships and shooting down planes? And getting their ships and planes shot down in response. Yes, yes. So I think we may see, you know, if let's say it happens tomorrow.

I think the Americans may target some drones and some missiles. But if you start sinking ships, you know, you start killing, that's very different. Very different. We don't have a treaty of alliance with Taiwan, which America doesn't even recognize as a sovereign nation at all and hasn't for 50 years, any more than we did with Ukraine. And you saw what happened with Ukraine. We're perfectly happy to help them get into a fight, but we're not sent an 80 second. airborne in there to redeem their men and kick the Russians out. But even if there is an agreement, what I say is those agreements are a piece of paper

and at the end of the day, states have the, they need to look after themselves first. It is reason of state rather than attack. Even the NATO treaty says if one nation is attacked, the other nations will then decide what to do. So it doesn't say we automatically go to war for you in there. And this is where I guess we begun of when I said, if I was the Australian, if I was an Australian dictator, I'd want nuclear weapons, is because I'd go, well, I want something in case America don't come.

You know, like, what happens if, then they don't pop over the border and start helping us out? Yeah. Well, and this is the problem is, and this is on the face of it, I guess, the most obvious critique against my position, which is America retrench and come home from everywhere and forget all of this, is that if we do that, then everybody's going to race to nukes, Iran and Saudi and South Korea and Japan and everyone is going to race to the A-bomb. You think that's right?

See, this is probably the thing I disagreed with yourself and the other gentleman on Lex Friedman is, I think the race to nukes is inevitable right now. I think it is. I think NATO, there's frictions in it. It's signatures on bits of paper. I don't think it's as strong as people. Like, at the end of the day, is America going to trade New York for Frankfurt? That's what you're asking for in a level of war like this.

And I just don't, I just don't believe so. And I think, and I think America, I think it's very easy for Americans who have currently the most powerful military in the world and have thousands of deliverable warheads. It's very easy for them to sit back, no, no, no, no. It's easy for you to say that when you've got it. You look over it like, and being from a country, which, you know, as I said, I'm not sure if it's in the beginning or to you off the line. I love America.

Australia is soft America. I think Australia and America culturally are incredibly close countries. I think we are actually allied one and two together, realistically. We fight with each other everywhere. We bleed with each other. We follow each other's norms and traditions and whatever. There's bits that are better about Australian, bits that are better about America. There's bits and pieces of each that are fantastic.

The opportunity is better in America, but it can also be a bit more brutal if you're not lucky. But at the end of the day, a country like Australia, we're looking and going, shit. At the end of the day, we have the American troops in Darwin. We've got some of the bombers in Darwin. But are they really going to start? If China just said tomorrow, we're fuck Taiwan. We're going for Australia. This is far, far more beneficial to us.

We're going to get all of the iron ore in the world and all the gas and all the 26 million people. It's not that many. Small army and the Americans say no, what then? And from a, you know, very strategically important country, geographically, unbelievably important country of Australia, but with very low military, like real military power, it concerns, if I would, was in charge right now, I'd be going, yeah, I want to be independent, completely, I want to be a completely sovereign nation with nuclear weapons. And I think many, many other nations that are in similar aspects, aka Iran right now, will be going, yeah. And Ukraine is a perfect example of

that. If Ukraine had nukes, Russia would not have moved over the border. When you mentioned Frankfurt, right, you didn't say Tallinn or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said a very important, yeah, exactly, yeah. It's not, it's not the middle, middle of Estonia somewhere, A realist, and I think a lot of those Baltic states should be a bit concerned about some of, especially the Trump. In other words, the posture of the United States is we're friends with almost everybody and nobody better ever mess with any of our friends or you're going to have to deal with us. But don't call our bluff because we might not. Well, that's the thing is America is tariffing us. Like, you know, we spoke about this earlier.

At the end of the day, it's like, well, hang on. So you've put a tariff on these products and you've done this and that. Now, I think for far too long, America has not looked after themselves first. I think far too long countries, look, I'll say Australia, but Europe more so, have sucked on the teat of American prosperity and have moved up the chain because of that. But at the same time, I am a big one of America has no permanent friends or enemies. They have strategic interest. and do they have strategic interest in this or that?

Well, that can change very quickly and it can change with the level of hurt that someone can put onto your state. So it's a scary world and it's a changing world. But as far as nuclear proliferation, I think that has been thrown out the window. And I think we'll see Ukraine move towards it in the future. Well, it's looking like Ukraine will not get into that.

realistically, with the comments Trump's makes, and realistically, I think a lot of European states say Ukraine and NATO, Ukraine and NATO, because they've got Trump saying no, they're happy to say, well, I'll look like the good guy and say yes. Yeah, domestic politics, but they don't really mean it. But they don't really mean it. Like, it does, you know, it's never come, push, come to shove. They've actually, are, like, has it ever come, hey, Macron, you are the deciding vote on this?

Yes or no. You know, if it came to that, I'm not confident on that. but Ukraine if you Joe Biden himself said come on man we're not bringing Ukraine in a NATO

we're just saying that we will someday but we're not going to But if you're Zelensky right now well you're in the you're in a green

military shirt if you're Zelensky right yeah if you were Zelensky right now and you know NATO's off the table what do you do you know

you're not going to have a powerful enough country in time to compete with the Russians in Russia's going to be there for the next century too the next thousand

they're going to continue being there and they likely are going to be a thorn in your side so if you were Zelensky right now regardless of what you think of him but if you were him and NATO's off the table you go well fuck

got to develop that too late though they try to make nukes now the Russians are just going to carpet bomb Kiev well yes but I'm saying like the war ends and you're not in NATO

you know you've got to have a deterrence there and we're trying get, try getting people to give up nuclear weapons now, you know, try getting around not to move towards nuclear weapons now and just build bunkers 200 meters under limestone and dolomite that has five times the, the pressure of high pressure concrete. Like, good luck trying to do that. Okay, so let's talk all about that. I mean, I've been saying for 20 years, that this is what's going to happen. You attack them, then they're going to race to a nuke. That's the obvious thing, because that was the latent threat, right? That was the implicit threat. Yeah.

was we have a breakout capability, don't push us like you did, the North Korea, to just leave the treaty and start making nukes. The problem with that, of course, is unlike with North Korea, where the United States of America was extremely busy in the early part of 2003, right? And four, with Iran, the problem is, if we bomb them and they race to make nukes, we can keep bombing them. And this was the whole problem with them race and make nukes in the first place.

We'll bomb you before you get one. So to me, it was the perfect standoff. They have a latent deterrent. We're telling them, don't go further than that. And they're saying we're not going further than that. And so let's just not squabble. And now we've gone ahead and crossed the line. So you're just virtually certain.

Hardliners are going to win this fight. The nuclear program is going to go deeper underground. And the purity of uranium 235 is going to go up and even atomic weapons. In my opinion, it makes sense. They kicked the inspectors out. They haven't withdrawn from the treaty yet or announced that they're withdrawing from the treaty. Well, I think too, I think that we're going to see a lot of countries question some of the

inspectors as well. I've spoken to some dear friends of mine who have raised their, well, how is the Mossad so informed here? How do we know that some inspectors aren't relaying information here? You are getting people into your most important. sites from nuclear energy. That was the same thing they did in Iraq too. They put so many CIA guys in the UN inspection team that Hussein was like, hey, this

isn't fair and stop cooperating with the inspection team. And then they go, aha, he won't cooperate with the inspection team. Once the can of worms has been open, once the genies out of the bottle, it's not going back in. And see, the other bit in this is, though, I'm then not saying that therefore we step into a more chaotic world. There's also the idea that we step into actually a little bit more peace because it's a gun to everyone's head. Have nuclear weapons caused more or less harm in the world than if we didn't have them? Okay, but we're still skipping a set, though, because if it's clear that they're breaking out, then wouldn't we just expect a full-scale carpet bombing campaign or whatever?

Trump's already proven that bluff call. We're going to bomb whatever you're doing. We're going to bomb whatever you're doing, we're not going to let you do it. He'd send in the 80-second airborne if he had to, right? It will depend on the pressure on the back end on Iran of do they move closer to Pakistan? Do they move closer to China? How does that go? At the end of the day, I, you know, strategy, maybe it's the infantry of me coming through. I think strategic bombing is massively, massively overestimated in its capabilities. That, okay, for Doe, I tell a lot of people hold your horses on how much damage

there actually is to foredough, okay? It's under a mountain. People talk about concrete. They talk about the GBU 57 and go, it's 80 metres or 60 meters of high-pressure concrete penetration. Yes, high-pressure concrete is 5,000 PSI. Limestone in that mountain range is 20 to 25,000. The dolomite can be up to 35,000.

And unlike concrete, that is, concrete is a foreign body you'll pull. putting in the ground and all the pressure can be moved through it, there's massive slabs of stone in that that can disperse a lot of the pressure and impact right away. And if it, at the end of the day, whether it is a 30,000 pound bunker buster or a bullet, things follow the path of least resistance. Now, of course, you've got the momentum of 30,000 pounds moving through. But if it has a path that is least resistance, it will start moving in the ground and you

are asking for if you have a bunker and 80 meters down, you're a few degrees off. You could miss. Now, I think there's been a lot of damage to foredow. I don't think it's destroyed. I really, really doubt that he's completely destroyed. There's going to be blast doors. There's all of this. And at the end of the day, even if it is, okay, if it's destroyed, what are you going to do next? Well, we know exactly the capability of that weapon system now. We know exactly how deep it can go. So, okay, make it 50 meters deeper than that or, you know, 150 feet deeper. And that is always the problem. And strategic bombing, well, if strategic bombing was going to just win wars and

complete, you know, everything's gone, why did American ground forces have to be in Iraq? Why did Russia have to go into Ukraine? I think we overestimate the ability for strategic campaign. You cannot seize and hold ground without guys on the ground. and this has always been my biggest concern, the day one of Iran, was Israel launched a war of which they cannot win. They do not have the capability to drop those bombs. It's not, you know, America can't give them the bomb because I don't have the bombers to do it. You started something of which you know America has to do.

And if America doesn't step in, you're fucked. America's running incredibly low on air defense missiles because of this, unbelievably low, scarily low, which is a point of where the fuck have your trillions of dollars been going over the past decades? How is all of Europe and all of America and Australia out of artillery, missiles, interceptors, all of this? And amongst us all, we have paid trillions and trillions of dollars and we don't have fucking one-five shells? Where the fuck is that gone?

That should be a big question, especially for a yanks. Like the amount that you guys pay, the amount that you're meant to have, and these are limited wars. Iran-Isra, small war, really. It took place over 12 days. Ukraine, Russia, fucking small war, comparatively. You haven't got India and China and Russia and Australia and all of Europe and all, everyone involved firing shit.

We would have been out in the day. If China knew the actual, the actual capacity of our munitions, they would have gone against their history and fucking invaders because they would have gone fucking three days. You're out of shit. Who cares? We'll walk through. I saw a thing where they have factory automated making cruise missiles where we still

make our tomahawks by hand or whatever at Lockheed. They have automated factory just shit them out 30 a day or whatever it is. Oh, mate. So the crux of where I'm at is unless there is a friendly regime change, a friendly to Israel regime change in Iran, you're going to go down the same path at an increased pace. And this is day one of what I've said is where this ends up. Where this ends up is American forces there. That's where it ends up, because Israel doesn't have the capacity to do it.

Like, Israel does not have expeditionary capacity of that. The argument being, now that you've bombed them, they're going to break out for a nuke. So you're going to have to keep bombing them, but that's not going to work. So then you're going to need a regime change. And the only way to do that is to put the third infantry division around there. Like people, people to say. Well, now, they can kill the Ayatollah with a well-placed shot. They claim, Trump said, I know where you live.

And how well does decapitation actually work in states? This is the one-man principle, or that we think we, people like to believe that Russia is Putin. Everyone else is, everyone else is, everyone else in Russia is pro. Now you got to kill every Shiite cleric in the country, or he's going to claim to be the Ayatatat. You kill Putin and you end up with Medvedev. But that, but it's, now you got to blow up all the aluminum smelters because otherwise they can just make more centrifuges. And what we have seen is what I think Israel relied on, and I don't know who did the analysis on this. was, I think they relied on we're going to bomb them.

The civilians will see their chance to take over the nation, and then they will have an internal overthrow. Now, I want the best for the Iranian civilians. I want those people to live in a prosperous, democratic, however they want, I want them to have the country how they want. I don't want girls having to dress a certain way. I don't want the morality police. I don't want, I want the best for those people there.

For the 92 million people that live there, I want the absolute best for them. And I want the best for people living in Tel Aviv as well. And at the end of the day, that's what they're relying on. What does it look like? It looks like a lot of civilians have rallied around the current regime. That's what it looks like. Of course, that's what always happens. It's called the rally around the flag effect that you go to the college, you know.

That's what you end up with. And this is where I've been, you know, saying about either Russian or Ukrainian, you know, drone strikes and whatever into cities going, this doesn't it demoralizes people but it rallies around their flag too the same thing happened you can hear

Churchill talk about it with bombing the cities that it doesn't really work I know we've got significantly better stuff now but in the day it actually rallies the civilians around it

and this is why things like false flags can work really really well is it rallies people around a cause and you'll go from there and it's happening in Iranian history too

when Saddam Hussein invaded it helped to solidify support for the Ayatoll's new regime back in 1980. So I think the genies out of the bottle, nuclear weapons, in my opinion. I think Ukraine was actually the first example of that. I know Ukraine never had, well, they had physical nuclear weapons, but not the capability to fire and target and blah, blah, blah, that everyone loves to get that wrong.

If we had our, no, you had someone else's nukes that were grandfathered into your state, but not the capacity to do it. But let's take that thought process. Let's take Ukraine had their own nuclear, Arsenal, Russia would not have crossed the border. In my opinion. I'd said that, no, they would have crossed the border sooner as all. Oh, yeah.

They would have just, yeah, okay. That was the line. They're never going to tolerate that. No, no, no, but not, no, no, I'm meaning, imagine if, imagine if when the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine was left with its own nuclear capability. Yeah, yeah, yeah, before all this. Right, right. Then it wouldn't have happened. And this is where we'll see all these states rush to these weapons.

In my, in my opinion, that's what we'll see. Now, rush doesn't mean a year. It could mean decades, but. And it doesn't mean that. But they, you know, even Mao Cetong, who was like the craziest murderer who ever lived, never used atom bombs. Yeah. Well, well, this is an argument. And you'll hear the Russian elite talk about this.

Who's actually used one here? And what did you use? The Democrats. What did you actually use that against to? What did you actually target? Did you target a fleet in the ocean? No. Like, you targeted a Christian city.

Now, the argument is, well, less people actually died. in a military operation. And that, whatever, but that's, it's comparing apples and oranges, too. Well, it's worth bringing up to, because this comes up all the time, they say, millions of American soldiers would have died in the thing. Well, that's not what the military said at the time. They said at the time that they expected 50,000 American soldiers to die. So now you're telling me you killed 200,000 civilians in exchange for 50,000 soldiers.

When you're assuming, of course, the premise of uncons. unconditional surrender and the necessity of invading the home island when you've already completely decimated their Navy and Air Force and have total air dominance over their country and the rest. Already firebomb in their cities and all of the rest of that. There's actually another point I wanted to make enough. But if you

assume a bunch of idiot premises, like every American would have died trying to invade Japan so we had to nuke them because I learned that in junior high school then, yeah, great argument. I guess the Democrats can kill whoever they want. Yeah. And I, well Well, look, I'm, the thing is with nuclear weapons,

I'm a bit of a fan of nuclear weapons. I think it has actually given us a lot more peace that nuclear weapons will probably be the end of humanity too, but at the end of the day, we haven't had a great... They weren't great until then, though. We haven't had a great state war until that point. Fantastic. But we have a book right there,

hotter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. All my interviews about nukes over the years, but the point being that, yeah, it's the ultimate bluff. Yeah. But, boy, once you call it, we're fucked. But, but, but, The thing is, too, we've not had a great state war since. And if Russia went into Ukraine and wasn't a nuclear power, we would have bombed Moscow.

We would have had troops everywhere. Like, at the end of the day, has it caused less human suffering that we have weapons that can wipe out states? Yes. It's a hard one. In the blink of an eye since the Second World War. Yes. But the thing is, once... Which is not necessarily like a longitudinal study, right?

It's a tiny, tiny part of humanity. And a lot of people like to think the world started at the end of the Second World War, and that's the history. But the other thing is the genie out of the bottle, and go back to Iran for a second, is we talk about those bunker busters. Okay, they can destroy something 80 meters under the earth. What if it's half a kilometer? What if it's a couple hundred meters? Well, the option you've got then is a nuclear penetrator. once you pull the genie out of the bag of using

the tactical nuclear weapons don't exist nuclear weapons used in a tactical sense to all nuclear weapons are strategic everything is strategic because it's interpreted in a strategic way whether it is half a kilo ton or 200 megatons it is strategic in nature but it can be used on the battlefield

or it can be used in a strategic and it is thinkable this came out a couple weeks ago before America bombed there was a story that said that the White House has decided that a nuclear bunker buster will not be necessary

because they think that their 30,000 pound bombs can do it. And then the White House denied that and said no, in fact, all options remain on the table. In other words, including a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear weapon state. But if they, if then, it comes to the point of, okay, the only way to destroy this bunker is a nuclear penetrator.

And do we let that journey out of the bag? Okay, but wait. So let me ask you, because you're an infantry guy, and you know the answer to this. Can't you just drop the 82nd airborne in there that go and destroy it with grenades or whatever? No, no. Why not? You surround them with 810s to keep the bad guys away. At the end of the day, the amount of, to do these long-range missions, well, look, America may, okay, let's talk about Ford.

And I did a whole, a whole 40-minute breakdown with some special forces guys about Fordow. When Israel said that we are considering a commando raid on foot up, I spoke to some of my friends who are both current operational and X, especially the guys who would do this, you know, tier one guys. And they basically said plausible, fucking unlikely. One, the terrain is unbelievable. There's still air defense and air superiority is very different when you're talking F-16 and F-35 compared to A10 and choppers.

Right. Yes. Iran's S-300s were very, very degraded. Their man pads, as far as man, portable air defense, shoulder-fired things, massive amount of them. At the end of the day, that sort of equipment, you're going to start eating choppers, you're going to start hitting A-10s, you're going to be in a world of hurt. You're going to have, it's going to be very costly.

Is it plausible from them? Yes, it is plausible, but you're going into a very, very difficult terrain. and what they said is it's going to be incredibly costly. You're going to lose a lot of people. So you drop in the 80 second, okay? They're under canopy. How much are you taking in under canopy? Fuck all.

In the reality of things, really little. You're jumping in maybe at best with 50 kilograms, you know, 150 pounds or something of equipment. 100 pounds of equipment, really. That's nothing. You're going into a nuclear facility where you might have a, I don't know, 50-ton door on the front of it. It might be more.

It might be 100-ton door. What do you do then? You're not cutting through that with a torch. You're not blowing it. Okay, then you get the door open. You have then 150 metre hallway, 300 foot hallway, with a machine gun at the end of it. How are we taking that out?

They know everything. They know the whole facility. We think we know the facility. But if you step into a hallway, and I'm meaning a corridor in a nuclear facility, 100 metres long, and there's machine guns at the end of it, and what they basically said is it would be doable,

but it would be so costly. It would be so fucking unpopular. They're going to see you coming. They're going to see you leaving. You're going to be in this facility. But isn't all that a price that Israel's willing to pay with American soldiers' lives?

Well, I don't think America would do it. At the end of the day, having, well, I don't know. You're saying they'd drop a nuke first. I think they'd drop a nuclear penetrator first and claimed any radioactivity from it was from busing the facility. Oh, they just claim it was a 30,000.

pound penetrator but use this is this this is a lot of a lot of what i do is what would i do in that situation my hands are tied i have to destroy this facility i'll fucking lie let's stop and go back and talk about your service yeah um when did you join the australian army i joined the australian army straight at high school so i had two days between high school and and this is what year uh 2014 okay uh i'm a lot younger than i look and just weathered from the infantry oh it's good to say infantry and chemotherapy and chemothera or weather you. Anyway, yeah, join the infantry.

People always ask why. I don't know. I just wanted to join the military ever since I was born. I just wanted to join the army. I was born in the era of the, you know, American-Australian army on TV and this and that and propaganda campaigns, and it fucking got me. And it still would get me.

Like, don't get, don't get me wrong. If someone crossed our border, I would still sign back up. Sure. Even if I was, even if I was like, this is a bullshit war, I'd be doing it for the boys around me. uh that that is a big difference in the forces are from the wars previous to the war's current is people's um i guess uh how um how they are fighting for the state versus for their friends and this is a big difference of back in the day it was i'm doing this for america and i think

a lot of soldiers now i'm like well i'm doing it because the other boys around me i don't want them to die i don't want me not to be there and this happens when they structure the military brigades and whatever in that way on purpose. So you're with the same few guys for years. Yeah, you're too to agree. You've become blood brothers. So it doesn't matter where they drop you in your fight for each other. Well, those of you who listen to me

tell you to listen to Mike Swanson at Wall Street Window and Tim Fry at Robertson-Roberts Brokerage Inc. had bought a bunch of gold. Must be doing great right now and should probably donate to the Libertarian Institute. Roberts & Roberts is the best. It's a matter of trust.

There's no flashy gimmicks, risky schemes. or bait-and-switch scams here. Robertson-Roberts is here to help you protect your wealth. Any portfolio ought to have a solid percentage in medals. For us Austrian school types, even more. Go to Robertson-R-R-Bi.co to protect yourself from monetary inflation. That's r-rbi.c.o. Hey, y'all, libertosbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show

and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things. including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart? Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertasbella.com. Hey, y'all, I've been working on the audiobook of my new book, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. I've now finished and posted part three of the audiobook to my substack and Patreon.

at Scott Horton Show.com and Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. So that finishes all of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I know there's still a long way to go, but just these first two chapters are almost 10 hours of audio to get you started. I promise I'm doing the rest as fast as I can. Get the audiobook of Provoked first. Subscribe at Scott Horton Show.com or patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. So then, yeah, I joined the military, and I was like, well, I'm joining the military. I want to be in the infantry.

You know, at the end of the day, no kid plays toy soldiers and he's a truck driver. You know, transport, you know, you want to be a guy at the front. That's what you want to do. Originally, I wanted to go direct entry special forces. I'm sorry, how old are you again? At this point, I was, when I first signed up, I would have been 17. But when I actually joined, I am 29 now. But when I actually joined, I would have been just 18.

Okay. So I think high school works a little bit different here with age. So we're high school for six years and we end at 18. And yeah, I joined right out of school. I had two days. I still hung over from the end of school party at basic training. Like, holy shit, what the fuck's going on? My head's shaved and I'm running orion.

And someone's yelling at me. Some, you know, 30-year-old with a chest full of medals is yelling. What the fuck? But, yeah, I joined up, went infantry. I wanted to go direct entry special forces, but we have two special forces, really, in Australia, or two, you know, the people who are more aware of. And one, you cannot direct entry into. And then the other one, you can, but it's basically for either if you've served previously.

So I was like, well, I'll go infantry and then I'll go that route. And I'm fucking glad I didn't go that route because I would have failed straight away out of school. No wonder it's for guys who have served previously. And, yeah, went through the training and then, you know, what, seven, and eight months later, I'm in the infantry, um, in a, in a brigade and hanging down and deployed Afghan, uh, maybe 12 or 18 months following that. So, you know, the Australian infantry, uh, and I'm biased, of course, but I, of all these infantry I've worked within the world, uh, I believe that we are probably the highest trained, but for a purpose,

because we don't have the numbers, we need to have very, very trained guys because they're dealing with fucking very small numbers. It's got to be like, hey, it's you better know what you fucking doing. Because, and the way Australians have fought previously and will have to fight is in a guerrilla-style warfare. So conventional warfare, you know, we're nothing on the Americans or the or even the Brits, maybe the Brits. But in a guerrilla sense, because that is the only way to fight.

And that's why Australians were so capable in a country like Vietnam or even Afghanistan was, well, the way we train, because we don't train for Vietnam or train for Afghan. We train to fight and defend Australia. That's what we train for, is, as I explained earlier, hey, we're going to have to split off into groups of four or eight and work completely independently and be striking a fuel truck here and fuel truck there and then treat them as they come.

That's how it's going to have to work. We're not going to be able to man the fucking borders and go for it. So we go through a fair... You're not actually seen as a proficient soldier until minimum of 18 months until you'd actually be signed off as proficient just as a basic infantryman and that's really where you start

before you start specialising and then I had a specialty in heavy weapons and combat tactical medicine and then I deployed overseas onto Operation High Road and I was a commander of the armoured vehicles and mobility there moving around to VIPs. And we're in Afghanistan.

So I was just outside of Kabul and we managed. So what basically what I was doing was I was armored movement. So if someone needed to fucking go somewhere or we needed someone, we would work out where, how you're getting there, what the risk is, what's going on or move you there, whether it is a VIP coming. At one point we were going to move and end up getting called off last minute for something. But we're going to move General Mattis and the country at the point at the time.

and ended up getting called off, I believe, because there was multiple convoys put on call for it and only one got him, something like that, in case there was a leak somewhere. I think that's how it worked. But we'd move people like that. We'd move prime ministers or whoever came and would also provide, you know, fire support.

If there was, like down in the Afghan National Army Academy where they were training, if we had guys going down there to train them, at the end of the day, they're going down there with a rifle. we would then come down there with a vehicle with heavier weapons in case something went wrong. But again, back to like, you know, the raid on Fordeaux, you get an idea in the infantry of what can you actually take in very, very little.

You know, in the end of the day, we're going down there in a 15-ton vehicle, but we still have very limited equipment. It's not like our base. Like, you know, at the end of the day, things go really wrong. What we want to do is move back into the HESCO barriers and fight from there because we've got all this ammo, all that, even with a 15-ton vehicle, we don't have that many rounds really like you know you're firing a uh i've got what the americans call it m2 40 i think you you call it but our 762 machine gun um you you start chewing through

rounds pretty fucking quick you know you're gonna chew through that um you know you if you get really in the street you want to be moving back into solid protection um so it gives you an idea a sense in the infantry of what you can and what you can't really achieve um and these raids and stuff while you see the special forces and stuff in Afghan and wherever you're like yeah but that's not against a facility like that like even you know bin Laden you're like yeah but it's against a fucking small compound it's not in this facility you know against incredibly trained guys um so yeah I guess to go back yeah I was in Afghan for eight months and a couple of weeks aroundabouts um I was young I was 20 21 I turned 21 about halfway through the tour um

And, yeah, leading around convoys and navigation and whatever else around, working with mainly the British, the Dutch, the Americans, a lot of America, Australian America do everything together. Oz lead nav for a couple of American marine bits and pieces. Fucking no one had triple A batteries for Garman's and I was the only one with it. So I was like, next thing, I'm fucking navigating. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on? I'm at the front with like their officer in command and I'm like that way I guess but yeah the Aussies and the Yanks you know it is as close as you can get yeah I read that a lot of times or and heard that from guys who fought in Afghanistan they had no respect for any of

the Europeans but the Aussies they like to brawl if we actually need to go out there and fight we bring the Aussies is stepping to anything for America which I'm a bit against too because it should be like hang on we still need to be independent and not just be, you know, follow around holding America. Yeah, we're not supposed to be there in the first place, so you're not supposed to be, like, tagging along either. It's had a big shift in how people say it with these tariffs that have come through. Now, I... Wait, wait, before you talk about that, are you friends with Braden Chapman and my other Australian veteran friends?

No, I don't know him. I don't believe. I may. I may know his face. There's a bunch of great... There's not many of us. Yeah, and some of them are whistleblowers. Yeah.

You know, and I guess one great whistleblower is sitting in prison right now for telling the truth, right? Yeah. You want to talk about that story? You know a little bit about that? Look, I won't add a respect for knowing some of the bits and pieces of people that are going through some court stuff at the moment. And I wouldn't want to trip up anything for them. Absolutely fair. Because at the end of the day, this could be used for that.

But there's a lot of gray area and fruit. fog around some of the occurrences that have occurred in the in there's some outright murders too there well it it's it you need to with all of it take case by case basis that's probably the biggest thing sure um and and and to be case by case on this and at the end of the day i think it needs to go through the courts as fair and just and beyond reasonable doubt of stuff and they need to still look at too around okay if if it is someone's word who is this person do they have incentive to lie? Do they have incentive to do this or that?

So as long as it's like, this is my whole thing is, I just want it to go through its proper process and I want the law to be seen to as the law. What I don't want is I don't want them trying to either clear it up because, hey, this looks bad for the state. No, no. If it looks bad for the state, it looks bad on the army, it looks bad on this, but it was done.

Hey, fucking do it because we're not about that. That's ridiculous. But what I also don't want is them trying to, hey, you know, we're a really progressive government, blah, blah, blah, fuck the army. Hey, these, this white dude who's 6'4 and musly and likes to do this, he shot some dude and, you know, it could be interpreted this way. So, you know, we're going to pin this on them and, you know, push down the army and push. Is that what you think is happening there, though? It seems like the only guy they went after was the hero who told the truth about the other guys murdering guys. See, this is where I want to be, because there's multiple things in the pipeline at the moment.

And there's a lot around. So, again, once you open that can of worms, there's a lot because it's, if you're whistleblowing, you're whistleblowing on a lot too. And, yeah, like you're whistleblowing on case by case too. So it is a very difficult situation there. I know people caught up in it, and the thing is there's still legal process continuing at this point. But yeah, all I hope is that to the lesser of the law and beyond reasonable doubt is seen to. And that doesn't mean that two things can't be wrong also.

And this is probably a big one that I think people, just because someone's guilty doesn't mean someone's innocent either. So if a crime has been committed, that crime has been committed. But if you've also committed a crime on the back end of something around, say, classified information or whatever, and you haven't followed correct procedure with this, and you can't prove that you have tried to do the correct procedure as well, then it's two wrongs. Don't make it right in that. So there's so much fog around this. And trust me, I'm as involved in a lot of the discussion as a lot. You know, it wasn't in the units, of course.

And even then, it's like, oh, shit, this is a fucking nightmare to pick through and what's actually going on. So it's a hard one. But we're seeing the same thing happen now with the Brits. And you'll see it happen with the Yanks of people a decade on saying, hey, I'm not really comfortable with what happened there and blowing the whistle now. and it's very difficult a decade on to then look back to what actually happened. What actually happened here?

Because I know in some of the cases at the moment, there's multiple up in here because it's open. Once you've opened that can of worms, it's fucking open. They're looking into everything. And I don't know guys were like, well, that's not how it happened, but it's my word versus theirs. And their word is some basically illiterate Afghan farmer whose son we shot because he had a weapon, but it's my word versus theirs, and this is very difficult at this point.

Some of the stuff's on video. Yeah, well, the... And some of the stuff, you have multiple sorts of, he took this prisoner around the corner, took him into the room, and then came back and goes, oh, yeah, he didn't make it. Yeah, because you murdered him. Well, and they all know it, and there's multiple witnesses to it. We'd have to go through the videos case by case. At the end of the day, would have to go through videos case by case, the complete situation.

around it and then overlay what is what is the situation here what is 20 minutes before the go pro and 20 minutes after the go pro what reporting got put in place as well at the time and the thing the the biggest thing that fucking pisses me off with the with the problems in Australia uh the the the case is going through at the moment is all of the offices have clean their hands with it sure no and you're going to hang on hang on hang on if you're a fucking, if you are the officer here and one of your, we call them diggers, like a private soldier, and they're fucked, you are, you are still responsible for that. And if you haven't been pulled this up and know that this is happening, because the

officers have gone, we didn't know what's happening. How? Bullshit. And, you know, they're putting through, oh, none of us can be charged and this and that. And you're like, hang on, this is fucking bullshit. And what has happened is now, like a lot of police, I guess, feel is when you have something that's happened that is lawful. So say when a cop shoots someone and it is lawful and then they get dragged through

the media, what you get is cops are not willing to discharge their firearm and cops who are not willing to work anymore. They get away with a lot more crimes against people than they get falsely punished for. Look, Australian-American policing is vastly different, I will say. But what we- Ours are trained by the shin bet now. So now we're all Palestinians. What we also can't have is guys who won't discharge their firearm when they need to as well.

And it needs, we just, all I want is due process and I want everyone to have their day in court, their say, and to follow beyond reasonable doubt with everything. And if, and people need to be also comfortable to whistleblown. They have to be comfortable to go and stand up and go, hey, and also in the case for someone whistleblower and ended up in prison. You know who needs to end up in prison is also, all his senior command because I was a corporal when I left the military. If I have a problem, if I see one of my guys do something and I go, look, I need to speak to my sergeant, one up, and he says no, then I go to a warrant officer.

He says no, I keep working up the fucking chain until I get to the chief of fucking defense. And this is the thing, is in my opinion, every single person who has said no to him, they need them, they need to burn. That's bullshit. If one of my guys commits a crime, a serious crime, you know, that's outside of civilian law. And I go to my sergeant and he pushes it on, through some of the rug. And then I go up. That sergeant should be in the fucking shit, too.

And there is a, that's what people need to feel comfortable to do. People need to be comfortable to stand up and speak up too, even if it's against what, you know, might be a boys club at the time. Yeah. And you're right that it should not be political at all. It's supposed to be, you know, strict rule of law under the military uniform code of justice. But we also need to apply that. We need to apply that everywhere too. And this has been one of my big bits around Russia, Ukraine, is the amount of war crimes getting committed is unfucking believable, unbelievable of what is actually occurring. And what I say is, but we only are willing to say that the Russians are committing war crimes. Right. Now, are the Russians committing war crimes? Yes. There's footage everywhere of it.

You know, absolutely, of using K-51 grenades, of shooting soldiers who have surrendered. What's like K-51 grenade? K-51 grenade is basically, it's a chloropichron right-control grenade tear gas, I guess. Chloropikrin is the active agent in it. Now, this is, it's banned on the Chemical Warfare Convention, and people say, and I know people in the comments go, but it's only a right-control, I don't give a fuck if it's right control or not.

I don't give a fuck what it is. it is clearly outlined in the chemical warfare convention that you cannot use this in warfare. You cannot use it. And clear as day, using, and it's wider things get used because it fucking works. What they do is they drop this in a trench line that goes underground, it goes underground,

guys run out, they strike them with an FPV. War crime, can't do it. But you know what I see just as much footage of? Ukrainians using K-51 grenades. And what I say is Ukraine is our ally. In the West, they are, we are supplying all of their munitions, we're supplying salaries, we're supplying all this, they are an ally. You know, at the end of the day, like I said, officers have to take responsibility for their guys.

We also have to take responsibility for allies. And if America see Australia committing war crimes, I'd hope that they would pull us up and vice versa. And we need to go, hey, you are fighting with our weapons on our dollar. We need to also abide by the laws of armed conflict. and a Russian soldier on his hands and knees surrending to a drone unarmed and wounded and you hit him with a drone is a war crime and I can hear spastics right now going

oh but you can't take prisoners of drones bullshit there is multiple footage of taking prisoners of his drones Ukraine also has the I Want to Live program which is aimed at Russian forces coming forward under drone so you have not only proven slow down and explain how that works how someone can surrender to a drone I've read it too, but just explain it.

Of course, it's very case-by-case basis of where you are. But if you are unarmed or you are hoard the combat, you are out of combat due to wounds, and you stick your hands up, a drone could guide you back to a line, back to if you're a Russian soldier, back to a Ukrainian line and surrender. I've seen footage of that happen. It's fairly common, you know, reasonably. But the thing is, once you've set the precedent that that actually can be done, Okay, we have seen that can be done.

Now, if someone surrenders and you hit them with the fucking lethal drone, you can go, well, hang on, hang on, there's case law that you can do this. Now, I'm not saying, you can change synonymous with Russia or Ukraine with these drone targeting. But in my opinion, the videos I see of hitting, most videos I see of unarmed, oh sorry, of unarmed surrendering soldiers getting hit by drones is Russians, getting hit with them. Ukrainian drone operators are killing a hell of a lot of Russian surrendering soldiers. hell of a lot. Are the Russians doing it too?

Yes, I've definitely seen footage of it, but I see a lot more footage the other way. Maybe because the Russians are on offensive actions, we see more offensive actions, therefore you get more footage of it, okay? But it also is a crime, and we need to go, well, our partners, we also need to have enforce the laws of armed conflict on that.

How do we expect someone to do it? How do we expect a country to go to the letter of the law if we won't do it ourselves? And I find that disgusting. And this is the reason the West is getting more and more hated around the world is hypocrisy. The biggest threat to the West in the world is hypocrisy because other nations are going, hang on. But you don't operate like this. We don't want to be friends with you. We don't want to, you know, now that, you know, the fantastically,

more and more people around the world are getting lifted out of poverty in many, many countries, many countries are going from third to second world. They start getting a bit more decision around what they do with their lives. And they will look and go, well, hang on, you've done this and this and this. But you're calling these people the bad people. Xi Jinping is meant to be our enemy. But I don't see him bombing all these people. I don't see, and I think it is a huge danger to the West.

because, you know, at the end of the day, we're losing a lot of, nothing has destroyed Western soft power as far as influence in nations like Israel and America's actions in the past. I'll say since October 7th, nothing has destroyed soft power like that because Muslim nations will look and go,

what the fuck? And other nations will look at where we have a, what's the term I'm looking for, a hierarchy of suffering. and go, hang on, but you care about these people suffering, but not them. Now, the perfect example of this is when there was that bomb dropped in, it was northeastern Ukraine, I believe it killed about 20 civilians and one or two Ukrainian commanders.

They bombed a military parade. Now, when I say military parade, the term parade in the military doesn't mean North Korean style or Red Square style down the street. No, a military parade can just mean where military is meat. up. So we parade at 7 o'clock in the morning. Gotcha. It struck, killed a couple of targets.

A senior command killed a bunch of civilians. Horrible, horrible thing. Civilian casualties should always be limited where it is. But what we saw following that is outrage from every Western leader. Outrage on Twitter. Outrage on news. Outrage everywhere. And a lot of people then started pointing at the hierarchy of suffering.

I went, hang on. But look at Gaza. or look at Lebanon and look at the amount of civilians getting killed to kill a target. And what I did is I looked at the, what do we call it, the non-combatant casualty value, NCV, I think it's, something like that. But basically what this number is, is how much can you, how many civilians can you kill to kill this person, okay? I thought you meant like the condolence payment.

No, no, no, no. Here's a couple of grand for your dead daughter. This is in targeting of, okay. Scott is a high-value target. Therefore, we will kill 20 civilians to kill Scott. And throughout Iraq, Afghan, low-value targets, you're talking one-to-one. You kill one civilian to kill one target. Iraq, sometimes, you know, that'd be working 20-30-to-one.

You know, you get a high-value guy that they're happy to kill 30 people to take him out. God, down. Now, now, well, strap in. Israel has, no one discloses these figures, okay? But, you know, you get a lot of disclosure, classified stuff through media and everything. Routinely are working on 30 to 1, 50 to 1, 100 to 1. In at least one case, worked on a 300 to 1 basis. And what I see...

Bombed a refugee camp in that one, right? And I believe this was to kill someone in Lebanon. Oh, okay. I'm thinking of a different one. Go ahead. But the thing is, too. But we have multiple examples. Sure.

That is. Okay. Yeah. And where a lot of people look at this and go, well, there's outrage over this, but none on that. The hypocrisy of adding that system of, well, you've got these non-combat casualty values. And, okay, I believe 30 to 1 is far too fucking high of maybe Iraq. But then you've got a country working 10 times that.

What? No, you can't fucking do it. Like, that's insane. And what people we're getting at. And this is where I talk about, I think hypocrisy is the biggest danger to the West, is that then countries look across and go, well, so the West is outraged about these civilians dying in northeastern Ukraine. And 20 died to kill one commander. Horrible.

But 300 died to kill one over here. And if you are a kid sitting in Indonesia, say, a predominantly Muslim country, how do you see that? Now, I don't care if you or I could explain a way and go, yes, but this person was in a camp and Hamas's tunnel and blah, blah, blah, and that this guy in Ukraine was off duty and it was Easter and this and that. Okay, I don't care if you can explain that because you know who's not going to explain that? Is the kids sitting in Indonesia trying to figure out if Indonesia is going to come into the sphere of influence of the West or into China? they're not going to do that and they're not going to listen to me

trying to try and fucking explain this away nor should they Oh it's been like this whole century I love telling the anecdote I saw years ago This is in like 04 Okay There's like a year into a Rockward 2

Maybe 05 But I bet it was 04 still Hell it could have even been 03 still And there was a guy who was a regular On Fox News at the time And I can't ever remember His name for the life of me But he used to come on there all the time

and he was interviewed by Sean Hannity and he says Sean we have to stop the war and Hannity's like what like you don't talk like that on this show you know he's shocked and the guy says listen I'm a missionary and I'm traveling around

Asia and everywhere I go to teach people about Jesus they say to me but that's the religion of the Americans that invaded Iraq and you're killing all these people and they won't even listen to me at all and so here on his hierarchy of values

God and his son are up here and the nation state and its democracy and its little policies are less important and Hannity you know and this guy was going

they like hung up on him he was going he's never on Fox News again after that right but he was so sincere that like look man Fox News is helping right now to make brand USA look really bad

in a way and look at all the chaos we've caused since then I mean that's nothing compared we've done a thousand times

that damage since then and this comes from I want America I want the West I want Australia I want Europe I want them to succeed that's the thing

is I want you know I think I'm from here too man I think that our system is it's not perfect of course

but it is the fairest it's that you can you've got opportunity women can do what they like, as far as within the norms of society, I'm guessing. And, and, you know, people like freedom. Great. I want our system to succeed. But we need to also see that we are the exception, not the rule. The Western world is what? Maybe just under a billion people,

max, probably more like 700 million, probably counting some, you know, some nations on the fringes of 8 billion and I tell you what to 8 billion people if you would have round up and go do you have a positive or negative view of America I'd tell you the fucking

vast majority would say negative and you know who would also say negative he's probably a fucking lot of other Westerners and a lot of Americans too and in the world's eyes as soft power is going to be

is more and more important than ever and the country's the key to it all because it's the cruelty is not just the hypocrisy but the absolute blatant barbarism going on here and the corruption in the economy you know why are so many kids this is one of the things i really wish i had not left on the table during the tucker discussion

he asked me at the end and something i really should have emphasized was um the corruption of american capitalism because of the great deformation of american militarism post world war two here is probably 85% of the cause of the belief in Marxism and pseudo-Marxism on the part of young people in this country because they just identify this

system as capitalism and they want to identify with whatever's the opposite of that. It's sort of the same reason I'm a libertarian because I identify free market capitalism as the opposite of what we got now. But that's why they're such socialist is because it's in reaction to the

corruption of American militarism If I want to walk down to the Austin University, I'm guessing, you would see a lot of very progressive socialist Marxist people. They are not, their head has not been filled with, you know, prop, they haven't been reading Karl Marx and this and that and fucking Lenin and become, no, no, no, they're just watching the news. They are, well, they're a reflection of their surroundings and their state around them. And what they're looking at is they're going, hang on, a fucking coffee cost $6, I can't He never afford a house.

The job opportunities are somewhat limited. My education is costing this much. And if I break my arm, it's going to cost me $5,000. And they're going, well, I can't afford this. So we look for a different system. And Tucker has a fantastic part of one of his podcasts. It's been clipped and bought out about I completely understand why young people in America or young people in Australia are socialist or markets,

or whatever you want to call. Completely understand it. The average price of a higher house in Australia is a million dollars. Now, I know in America it's significantly cheaper than that, but that's a million Australian dollars. So we're talking 650,000 American dollars. It's the average. Price is around here way up to.

It's a monetary inflation. And people go, I cannot afford that. I cannot afford my rent. They look for different systems. They are a reflection. It says the government is a reflection in society, and society is a reflection of the government. You're looking in the fucking mirror.

And at the end of the day, we need to look at not, hey, we're going to take the, you know, oh, these fucking people on the right wing, they want guns and ammo and blah, blah, blah, and they like Jesus. And all people on the left are fucking crazy flying, trans flags and this and that.

We need to go, why is that? Why do these people feel like they need to be armed to the teeth? Or why do these people feel like that they need a more communist or socialist-style society? Why do these people feel like that? And we also need to go, well, if we want to be free,

people need to be able to go as far along this left and right as they like. Because I'm a freedom absolutist. I'm a freedom of speech absolutist too. Me too. But I will support someone's right to fly whatever banner they want and whatever views they want, as long as it's not physically harming someone. But we also need to accept that and go,

why is that? Why are people becoming more extreme? Why is Europe moving further right? Like way further right. Why is that happening? Look at the EU. It's exactly the reason it's fucking happening. Look at what Kaya Callas will say on something.

And you're like, yeah, no shit that young men are fucking not buying this Kool-Aid bullshit. No shit everyone left California to come to Texas. Like all of that. Um, yeah, it's, there's things I love about America, and I should say there's things I love about states like Texas. I haven't spent much time in many other states. I've spent probably about eight months here all up. Um, and there's bits that I, that I, I find a bit backwards too. Um, and bits that I find that is a talking point rather than actually in, like, like, freedom. It's like, well, okay. But people, people, have.

part of freedom, in my opinion, and you know, you disagree with me as you'd like. But freedom also means that you have the freedom to be able to afford to live, too. That you can, you can, you have the freedom to go to school. You've got the freedom to safety, but you've got the freedom as well to be able to afford to go to university and get into a competitive market and there, and therefore we have bases that where you can move in a competitive system. But I see that there is this, I think, I think the, um, The bits I love about America is that you guys can hold this and you fly your flag and speak about this and it's great.

You know, your media is far more open to discussion than a lot of countries that say that they're freer too. I don't feel any threat on this podcast criticizing Trump or Biden or Harris or you or anyone. You know, really, I could say that I believe American police step over the line far too fucking often. As a foreigner in your nation, you know what's going to happen to me now when this goes. up? Nothing. Nothing. At the border the other day, I've ticked a whole bunch of fucking weird boxes on my, on my, my ester, like, these are to come in. Hey, man, have a good day. That's something I love, but I think there's this too. There's an illusion, too, of freedom means that I've got a gun and a this and a that. But I'm also

like, okay, I can agree with that, but people also need the ability to fucking live. Look, this is why the American freedomists, aka the libertarians, we're all for hard money. We all want, I showed you that my mug with the hanging banker. Why? Why do libertarians hate bankers? It's because bankers create new money and they dilute the value of everybody else's money. Monetary inflation causes price inflation, causes the boom and bus cycle, ruins everything. Why in the world should houses get more and more expensive? Because we allow government to control one half of every transaction, the currency. What is this? Russia or something?

Yeah. It's ridiculous. Should be 100% gold standard, and any banker or government official who creates a new dollar should be crucified. And then they'll learn. And then they can't do that anymore. And then the price of everything will fall as technology and productivity improve like it would work in a free market capitalist system, obviously. The biggest thing, my biggest observation of America, is the creep in price. I'm telling you, man.

Learn about Austrian school economics. I'm guessing that, yeah, I'm guessing that most of your audience is American. And therefore, you've seen a, because it's creeping so slowly, it's moving your chair back a millimeter every day. No one notices when you hit the wall. Because you're American, you haven't actually noticed this as maybe as much as I have. The first time I was in America was in 2019. First time I visited it.

Then I came back the next time. in 2023, I believe. And I don't know what the inflation rates you guys have been told is. It is double as expensive. Oh, yeah. It is... We noticed. We did notice.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is I think many... You are very observant and you're in this sphere. But I think a lot of people who just day by day pay their bills, go to work, they're a teacher, they're a cop, they're whatever. They've noticed just a 5% or 10% difference week to week. And because that... Years a year, because that's so over time, they haven't... I went, came back, and because I had that, like, hard reset, I'm like, what the fuck?

Yeah. This is why the Democrats lost. I'd like to think that it's a thousand other things, but it's the inflation more than anything else. The price of America is insane. It makes it impossible to, yeah. America is way more expensive than Australia, everything but housing with, it's hard with job opportunity. There's more and less in many ways.

America is in a difficult spot. America, Australia, whatever, we should not have people homeless and street. Now, as well as, you're going to always have people with mental health who end up on the street. If you just have a million people, you're going to end up with 100 of them. But the point about the money is the rising prices is because of monetary inflation, and the monetary inflation is to make government seem free. Because if they raise your taxes too much, you won't pay them, right? And so they just print it.

Yeah. And then you end up paying later when you're staring at your shoes, standing in an unemployment line, and you don't realize. No, this is your cost of killing all those Afghans. You know what I mean? We had to, yeah, that wealth had to come from somewhere. It's in your future time spent idle or at your uncle's funeral when he shoots himself in the head because he got laid off and he doesn't know why the economy booms and busts every 10 years and that it ain't his fault. And it's, which happens. And I'll tell you, after the crash of O8, because I'm just a new. God, it's all I do is read the dang news. And after the crash of 08 and then, you know, into 09 and 010, there's just nothing but dudes blowing their brains out. Because there's, you know, people internalize the responsibility for their failure. He's like, no, the masters of the universe have waged a world empire and boomed and busted your economy. You had nothing to do with it. You're the poor schmuck that got run over.

And people are like, oh, my God, I worked my whole life and I failed and I can't protect my family and whatever, and they just jump off a bridge. It's crazy, man. It's horrible. It's crazy and it's horrible. It's why everyone needs to learn Austrian school economics. It's hard money is the solution to this. It's the only solution to it.

It's the people that work the hardest. Yeah. And this is, there's a great, and the thing is, and I love to say to people, you need to take in information from everywhere. Extreme left, extreme right, everything. Take it in, find your own happy medium. And what I said to you before is one of my favorite bits to tell people is disagreement and competency is not synonymous.

You can disagree with someone and say they're fucking competent at their job. My biggest concern with the Ukraine negotiation is the competency of the American staff and Ukrainian staff versus the Russian. Hey, let's hold that thought right here because let's refresh our coffees and we'll start up with what I really want to get into what's going on in the Ukraine war with you. Sorry, well, so I want to say one thing. Go ahead. Finish that thing.

that I was listening to this guy who's a hard left, like a hard left socialist economist. And his biggest message, I disagreed with a lot of what he said, but his biggest message was we're killing the middle class. And he said, what we're going to end up with is no middle class. You're going to end up with people that are lower class

who can't make the leap to high, because that's impossible to make. You're going to end up with high and low, no middle. And you're going to have a fucking, a society of basically zars and poverty. And to be honest, if I look and observe Australian in America, people are getting richer at a rate and people getting poorer at a rate, no one seems to be in that, you know, two people both earning $100,000 a year,

they own a home, they have a dog, they have two kids, they have two cars, getting by great. That's fucking non-existent anymore. Two of my friends, so my closest friend, she's a doctor, he's a propulsion engineer on fucking aircraft, they can't buy a fucking house. They have one car.

You know who the middle class is? The retired people who already own and middle class people already own homes and then they don't realize this, but they're all on welfare as the value of their home is constantly increasing because of all the new money being ejected in and then they get to refinance their house

and all of that. The middle class is what drives a country like America. At the end of the day, that is the worker ants in the fucking. system. And we are killing that class by making their dollars worth less, working more hours, more restrictions, everything. We are killing that class. And at the end of the day, there may be some people who are very, very Marxist talking about this, but I believe they're right. It's like, it doesn't mean therefore we bring in these fucking Marxist policies.

Yeah, price controls ain't going to help. And it doesn't mean therefore we have to tax the 1%. No, no, no. It means, hey, we need people to be able to afford to fucking live. If you're working 50 hours a fucking week. I don't care if you're working a McDonald's or as a doctor and engineer like my friends. You should be able to afford to live or else you know what you're going to end up with. You're going to have people going, looking

for a different system. Look, and what's in the news right now all the time? Donald Trump is mad as hell at the Fed because he wants him to cut rates and print more money. He wants more inflation because it's an artificial prosperity and when the music stops we're due for another crash. And so just like last time he wants to put

off the crash to let somebody else's So every time that music stops. Which just means that when the crash does come, it's going to be that much worse. That's the thing, though. Every time the music stops, it stops a little bit longer. It stops a bit harder. Yep. When does the music stop and it doesn't restart?

When does the music stop and the fucking... When people lose confidence in the dollar all together. Yes. Right. And we're getting there. Well, you speak to many people who are saying we're witnessing the end of an empire. Many people will say that. Inshallah. Hang on.

We'll be right back. We'll be back. Hey, y'all, I've been working on the audiobook of my new book, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. I've now finished and posted part three of the audio book to my substack and Patreon at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. So that finishes all of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I know there's still a long way to go, but just these first two chapters are almost 10 hours of audio

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All right. Continuing on here, part two of our interview with the great Matt Williams. Willie OEM. What's OEM? Oh, I am. It's an order of Australia medal. So it's a Queen's commendation.

Why do I always see OEM? That's just because I got it wrong. OEM. OEM, the original manufacturing, whatever it is. But no, no, no. It's OAM. So it's a service to the metal, a service to the nation medal, basically.

And I can have, so depending on the level of, I don't know if you have this in America, but depending on the level of commendation or like a ward, you can then have a post-nominal. So my name on my license is Matthew Williams, oh, I am. So my license, my passport, whatever, can show that I am a Queen's Order of Australia medalist. So that's what it means, yeah.

Gotcha. Okay, so speaking of which, that's your YouTube channel where you specialize in, You talk about Gaza and Iran and wherever the things are blowing up. But, of course, especially you've been looking at Ukraine. Yeah, well, I've spent a number of months in many. So I've spent, you know, seven to eight months in Ukraine and, say, a few months in Israel and whatever, too. So, yeah, I get around too, which is good and bad.

I mean, I don't agree at all with Douglas Murray about that you need to go there at all. Anything, it can actually skew your vision, because if you go to Israel, you're shown Israel. Yeah, you get the contempt contour. Well, you can also, like, everywhere in the world, people are lovely. I went to, the most lovely people in the fucking world when I was in Idlib in Syria. Fucking lovely. But what you get, then, is you get, you can be very skewed by, well, these people are lovely, and then those people must be evil.

No. You know, like, you can actually skew you, to be, to be unbiased, is actually can be easier as an outside observer, a little bit like we talked about the American economy. I actually think it's easier for me to say, your inflation is out of fucking control when I've had like a two or three-year gap between seeing it rather than this lifestyle creep that people may just experience. But yes, mainly specialize in Ukraine, Russia, an attritional nature of warfare, which this is.

So I asked Daniel L. Davis, the great American hero, because he's a whistleblower on the Afghan war, well, who's your favorite Ukraine war analyst? And he said you immediately. That's how he knows what he knows. and Daniel Davis knows a hell of a lot but so I watch you whenever I can and I have to say

that I'm always so far behind on everything that sometimes I have trouble because you're zoomed in so close on this or that part of Zabroja that I don't know where the hell we're talking about now you know what I mean? So

so but then I guess that's probably the same for most of the audience too We're all very far behind on what's the battle map in Ukraine look like now? The last I saw it, they controlled virtually, the Russians controlled virtually all of Lujansk. Still 99%. Okay, right. And then you go ahead from here and tell me at least your thumbnail sketch percentages of control over Donetsk, Ziproja, and Kersan, and then take me to show me in Harkiv and whatever else you need. Okay, well, as far as percentage controls, I'd need to bring up.

Max to look. But like, it's, it's, it's, of the four major ones. It's 99.8% of Lansk. It's, right. And it's, it's, it's three quarters of Donis, and it's, it's a fair bit of La Hansk, sorry, of, um, Zapp, there's fair bit of, what? So it's more than half. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, you're talking three quarters, two thirds of these.

But you're also talking, when you talk with Herson, you're talking that they also hold, on the river. They don't hold the other side of the river in Herson, which is, Again, body of water, incredibly difficult cross, both ways, in unbelievably hard. Right. So of the four oblasts, of which Putin is demanding, he controls the majority of those four, and very, very close in law hansk to controlling 100%. And then Putin also occupies parts in Kharkiv.

He opened a new front line. When I say, the Russian command, he's not commanding fucking troops. So, discount that. The Russian forces opened a new front line yesterday the day before in Kharkiv, and then they, of course, hold areas in Sumi. So Sumi is maybe 150 square kilometers. You know, that's what, 100 square miles say?

And in Kharkiv is, you know, maybe 50 square miles. But it's, it's, it's, it's, that is far more strategic than it is seizing and holding ground. It's to move Ukrainian forces around. And this is exactly what you do in a war where you are numerically superior. If you have more forces, well, then if we should lengthen the front line, we thin you out. We thin ass out too, but it's less catastrophic. If you've got 10 men on the football pitch and they've got five and you make it twice as wide,

you're going to suffer less than them. That's what the Russians are doing. This is where Ukraine opening Kerskold Blaster, where they moved back into Russia, was fucking catastrophic, catastrophic for the Ukrainian forces. And I've never been dragged as much online as when that, day one, that opened, day one, Ukraine made a heap of grand

and I said this is a huge fucking mistake. And David said the same thing to me on the show that day. And everyone said, no, no, no, but they've got, you know, 50 square kilometers in a day. And I said, wait. Now, it's turned out worse than I predicted. It's not what you do. You do not lengthen the fucking front line.

Let me ask you a caveat, because that's clear. Okay, there's caveats everything, yes, yeah. But here's caveat. Didn't everybody think that, boy, this isn't going to last, and then didn't it last much longer than anyone thought? And then what does that tell you? Does it tell you about the strength of the Ukraine? It tells me the Russian forces are better at strategy than people like to think.

In other words, and now, just to be specific here, this is not a cope for like rationalizing the Russian side. You're saying they were smart to kind of kettle the Ukrainians inside their country. They did exactly what I said you should do. So, let's base at the time who thought it was a trap. I thought that they let them, that they let the border guard be light in order to encourage. Look, I don't agree that they encouraged them across, and I don't think they purposely trapped them, but they've taken an opportunity where it was given. And look, let's say in the beginning, if you just have a spectrum of pro-Russia pro-Ukraine, I'd sit closer on the pro-Ukraine side.

been there. I want them to have a prosperous society and their own sovereignty and independence, but also take into account the caveat's nuance of, if you're next to a great state, a great power, there's certain things which just operate fucking differently. Mexico, like it or not, has to operate differently because they're on the border of the US. They just fucking do. It's not fair. It's bullshit. Okay. Okay. But you just do. If China wants to. If China was to put nuclear weapons in fucking New Zealand, Australia would say fucking no. We said the same thing when Indonesia and Russia were talking about Russian bombers in Indonesia. You know what Australia did? We said fucking no. That's how this works. It's not fair. It's Professor Mershon puts

better than no one. The tragedy of great power politics, it's a tragedy, but it's the way the world works. My best mate is 6'3-ish, 120, 130 kilograms. It's just, I don't know, 300 pounds of 200 yeah we're near 300 pounds something like that and he's a black belt jiu-jitsu if he pushes me at the fucking pub or someone pushes him

versus they push me me a very fucking different outcome okay it's not fair but it's a different fucking outcome now so we'll caveat that what I said when Ukraine moved into

Kursk is I said the Russians should only work to stabilize and lengthen their offensive in. Tie them up there. You need way more numbers on offensive action than defensive. So Ukraine push in 10,000 guys. Russia's only going to need three or four thousand to hold it.

And what I said, go back to my fucking video on that day. I said the best way for Russia to defend against this is push hard in the east. Ukraine's pushing in the north, fucking push hard in Donnesk. What did we see for the next three months? Record gains, month on month on month in the east. And it's exactly what you would do. because what you do is why push back, draw them back out. And what Ukraine did was they got fucking stuck in Kursk.

It should have been, if it was a, sorry, I'm passionate about this, if it was a raid, if they went across, captured 200 border guards, killed 100 border guards and went back in a week, would have been a fantastic spectacular operation. That's what I predicted day one. I said, this is not going to last. There's no way. They're not going to season hold ground here. Because as soon as you push in like that, you're surrounded on three sides.

Right. And not only that, border crossings fucking suck. So there's shitty roads and border crossing between Russia, Ukraine, it sucks. But the ability for Russia to bring logistics into Kursk is fantastic. It's a fucking train. And then you're straight in. And your air cover, your artillery, everything goes on three sides. You go in surprise, back out, fucking done.

Where Ukraine has to bring shit across a fucking border covered in fucking drones. All this shit. And it wasn't that at all. They went in and Zelensky for some reason, Zelensky and he, and Sersky, they believed that Russia would swap a thousand square kilometers, which was the absolute max, for 100,000. It will be a bargaining chip of taking background. And I'm like, but even at 10 to 1 kilometer squares change, it's negligible.

Okay, we'll give you 10,000 for 1,000. They occupy 120,000. Especially when the time is on the Russian side anyway, right? Well, this has been an argument of what people said in the beginning. It was everyone in the beginning, said times on the Ukraine side because of the Russian. economy. And I said, maybe be careful on that,

because time tends to be on the side of the country with the larger population and larger industrial capacity. What have we said? Full of timber and oil and gas and food. To export and food, yeah. And, and neighbors of which don't give a fuck

about your, um, your sanctions. Yeah. No, we're not going to send inspectors to the Mongolia fucking border or the China and be like, oh, what's in that fucking box? No. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I got to interject this because I just think it's so important.

The war nerd Gary Brecher wrote an article back in 2014 where he goes, hey, look, everybody, Russia just opened up their natural gas pipeline to China. Game over. Europe can never threaten Russia again with economic blackmail of any kind because they just don't need you. That's it. And that was 10 years ago. Well, yesterday, South China Morning Post,

or whatever they called himself, had a, had a article that the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, who again goes into that what I spoke about of competence and agreement is not synonymous, incredibly competent foreign minister, absolutely fucking roasted Kayakhala and Ursula. And basically sat them down and gave them a fucking lesson in real politic and was like, I don't give a fuck about your ideas of values win wars. It doesn't. This is, and the article's fantastic about Wang Yen. you basically smoking these people about like this isn't how the world fucking works and that we can't let Russia lose.

China doesn't want a fucking a belligerent on the border with nuclear weapons who's out of control. I don't want that. They won't let them lose. And they will just keep buying shit. And, you know, it's the sanctions have had impact, but not, Matt, like, oh, okay, not massive, you know, like, and Russia's industrial capacity now is four times the West, including America. And that goes to the larger question too. And we can zoom back into Ukraine. I really

want to. I mean, you brought it up. So it's important that as far as I understand it, America's Russia policy is really all about trying to one, either win them over, would be at least Kissinger's previous stance and the Trump and Hillary Clinton stance even with the reset in early Obama years. We want to bring Russia West to deprive China of them. Yes. And then the other idea is, and this is later Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Hawks, is, well, that didn't work. So now we want to bog them down in a war in the East and weaken them, again, to deprive China of them.

One way or the other is what it's really all about is China. So then, as you're saying, that's all the reason that China has to do everything they can to keep Russia in the game in their West. So, look, we are actually, before we get into the question about China, I've never had Dr. Pepper before. Oh, let's do this. And you said that I need to try American Dr. Pepper. Well, we'll see. And then I'll answer the question about China

because I think this is the biggest part of this war. We're going to find out. That's right. Whoa. What's the flavor meant to be? It's almost licoricey. It's nice. No, no, it's not licorice.

Licorice is carbonated water fruit or fructose corny. It's got antifreeze in as what it's got. That had probably banned in Australia. I don't know. Anyway, so let's... I'm going to try something new on the podcast, huh? What the fuck? I used to know what it was called.

Hey, I think they took the antifreeze out of here. Damn. I'm going to put it in my radio. Or they just took the antifreeze off of the ingredients. Yeah, it was polyethylene glycol. Jesus. Which is just ethylene glycol as antifreeze. polyethylene glycol is your Dr. Pepper ingredient,

but apparently they stopped listing it on the can. I don't know if they really stopped putting it in there. Oh, my God. Not that it ever stopped me from drinking it. Yeah, exactly. So China. China is the... Wait, so do you like it?

Yeah, I like it, yeah. He likes it. I like it. So, China is a larger threat. So, sorry, sorry, I use the word threat. Competition-wise, China is more of a threat to America than the Soviet Union ever was. China's potential and latent military power and just overall power is unbelievable

well over a billion people purchasing power parity of a larger GDP than America talking 40 trillion I believe manufacturing off the fucking charts like one single port in China makes more than like the rest of the world in shipping unfucking believable power

but China's problems all the problems China has in a protract war is solved by Russia. So, China's primary issues, if it were to step into protracted, this doesn't mean hot war, but it could mean cold war too. China's largest issues is feeding the population, land, how much land do you actually have. Now, they've got a lot of farmland, but if things start, you know, getting difficult, well,

Russia is a huge exporter of food, one of the largest in the world. So Russia solved that. The largest military issue is ports, access to the sea, and different seas. If I could look at Russia's coastline, all the way from riding NATO to up over the fucking Arctic, everything. Some small bits of technology. China is world-leading or very close to America and a lot of technology, particularly around things like AI.

And we don't know how far China is down the line with things like stealth on aircraft. I know the American, you know, Instagram, Hawks and YouTube is, ah, it's fucking, it's got the radar cross-section of a tanker, and you're like, no one knows that. No one, you don't know that. Unless you're in the fucking Chinese MSS and you are top-secretely, you don't know the radar cross-section on that aircraft. So we don't know. But some small bits technology as far as high-end submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare, Russia is world leading that, as well as nuclear propulsion. Russia is world leading at nuclear propulsion, icebreakers. So that's why Russia and China are working together at the moment on nuclear icebreakers.

They're fucking doing that for the Arctic because there's a lot, they said, why do you think Trump wants Greenland, fucking war on the Arctic? And whether you believe the climate change is human made or cyclical, I don't give a shit, we know it's warming up north. Therefore, way more becomes available. North Sea route, North Sea route becomes more available. Well, let me just add right here, because this is what we call in the new world, the Northwest Passage is to be able to sail above Canada, which is what we're

what they always wanted and never could, and now they can. But there's another one, which is the route above Northern Asia, above Russia, to go from China to Europe, which means you don't have to go around India and up the Red Sea or around Africa at all. And I forgot the number of days save. Why do you think some countries that are proxies, are blocking off the Red Sea? So, you know, this is all soft power, hybrid warfare, gray warfare, whatever you want to call.

But again, so the problems, China. The problem that China has, Russia solve a lot of them. And there's more problems than just that that they solve. But vice versa. Russia's biggest problem is population. It's high-level technology and cheap manufacturing things like chips. Well, who the fuck is the world leader at that? With all those sectors.

Fucking China. Huge problem. If these two don't have a formal military alliance. But the relationship that these two have should terrify people. It should. And this is, overall, with Russia, is what I've been saying, and I said yesterday, is that Trump, his largest competition is China. Absolutely. The ones to knock America off, off number one spot is China.

And that doesn't mean militarily. That just means in many different ways. And then I've already knocked off manufacturing in many other sectors. You look at the graduates in STEM, trust me, they're way ahead of fucking that. But that the American need to, they reason to say, they want to stay where they are, maintain the status quo.

And what I've said is that Trump, someone like Trump, a real, realist leader like that, will, if he has to, throw Ukraine under the bus, or throw any, any country under the bus, to bring Russia away from China, if that's possible. Now, many people will say,

it's too far gone. And many people in the more pro-Russian audience or, you know, global South audience will say it's too far gone. Russia and China are too close together. Now, I disagree. I think culturally and traditionally, Russia and America are far closer

than Russia and China. Putin thinks that too. And it's said that explicitly his whole career. Christian, it's Orthodox. You know, it's Moscow's a European city. You know, like, yeah, at the end of the day. And I think we will see a huge amount of effort put to bring Russia,

back into the Western sphere of influence. Whether they want that or not, I'm unsure. Whether it's possible or not, we'll see. But I think we'll see a lot of that. Because what we've done is the Rand Article 2019 of extending Russia basically explains exactly what has happened. Is, right, we want to weaken Russia militarily through Ukraine. But in that, I think it's a massive document. It might be 50 pages, but pretty near the end.

It talks about what considerations are there and what problems. could become of this. Right. But we could end up creating division within NATO. Ukraine will wear a measurable cost, and Russia may just move its industry into war. Right. And the whole document is like that. They go, well, you know what we could do?

We could back the jihadists in Syria more again. And then they have disclaimer. Of course, if you do that, they might create a bin Ladenite state. And we don't want that. And then they go, well, we don't want the Soviets in Kabul, so we fund the Mujahideen. Yeah, we could put more weapons into, I mean, just in this specific document, the extending Russia document. We could put more weapons into Ukraine. Disclaimer, that could cause Russia to go ahead and invade, which is not what we want, right?

Well, I'm not convinced it wasn't what they wanted either. Well, not the guys who wrote that RIM study anyway. Yes. So, so that's where we are. And China, we don't know where they go. And historically, you know, people talk China, you know, they're going to invade this and fade that. You know, well, history doesn't really show that, guys. They're all under heaven.

Let me ask you this. Donald Trump came in, and at one part, he was musing and, you know, he says a lot of things. Trump's Trump. But he did say, in one of his first days in power there, and one of those little press gaggles in the White House, like, hey, I don't want to pivot to great power competition. nor should we with Russia and China at all

I want to just pivot away from conflict with anybody and let's just make money and be at peace and I thought

hey yeah how about that but I wonder okay so like in your military mind to what degree does America

the great power have to deal with Russia and China as powers in in at least competition

or to what degree could we you know as Trump what we're saying, just kind of drop all of that and figure out how to get along and be right? For American to maintain the status quo has to quell China. It's not about America growing.

It's about shrinking China. If Americans want to maintain the status quo at the moment of America number one, China number two, it's, to grow America is too difficult, too expensive and you don't have the resource to do it. So we use that try and reduce China's rate of growth through sanctions or through not doing business or moving parts out and increasing soft power, whatever. That all sounds like short-term goals

at long-term expense though, right? Because you just breed all kinds of resentment and further enemy status. This is the tragedy of great power politics. The thing is, if you want to maintain status quo, well, you have to knock them down a peg too. And that is the problem. Because if Trump comes in with the idea

of we don't want great state competition, what if the other great state says, but we want great state competition. We're not happy with being level. Like what happens if Xi says, that's nice, Trump. That's nice that you want to be equals. I don't want to be fucking equal.

I want as much. I want China to be number one. If you think America first is big in America, nothing compared to China first in China. It makes American right look like pussies. People go, we want America first, but we still want to look after Australia and this and that. China, China first is,

are you Chinese? No, fuck off. That, you know, that's it. And, yeah, of course, the problems that comes with this as well. So that's the thing is, is you're asking other countries to play ball. But we're also asking other countries to play ball while we ourselves spend a trillion dollars a year on defence. And it's not defence because we're not building defensive items. We're building submarines to go around the world and ships that carry planes and can work as a floating airport off the coast. And we have ships all around Taiwan and China and this and that. So it's also like, okay, you make the first move then. And are we prepared to that? No, because what if they don't? Like, this is the problem. And this is where we will just switch, and we're

probably already have into a bipolar system where you have, you know, two regional hegemons of America and China, and you have centres of influence from there. And that's a hard bit about, say, Australia. And this was a brief the other day that I was, how do I put this, informed about, I will say, was either way Australia lose. That either way Australia is in bad, because 30 to 40% of our total GDP is from China. Who do you think we're fucking selling shit to? But then we're a Western state relying on American defense.

And if America go to war with China, we're fucked. If America don't go to war with China, but want to move away and try and de-influence them, we're also fucked because we can't sell anything. We're in a bad way, either way. This is where I think we should be walls up Australia. Everyone else fuck off. But that's my willy dictator ship. And I'll be nuclear armed under a mountain.

You've got to turn those spiders into profit somehow. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. but it's a very difficult situation with China and we need to we need to just we need to sort of come to the conclusion of are they a threat militarily or competitively a threat because that is it is different but both it can both can be true as well but do China want to go and invade other areas what doesn't look like it And China and Russia are having a massive increase in soft power because they will work with states or governments of which we won't work with as well.

We will work with the state as long as you sort of abide by our rules-based order, whatever that is. If you're, okay, we'll work with you, small African nation, but you must be democratic and you must do this and you must do that. Rather than you be yourself, you be whatever you want to be, we just want access to. a port or an airfield or this or that. And especially China, their fingers are in every pie, everywhere. Their global reach is unfathomable. People don't realize it in the most populated state in Australia, Victoria. The Chinese, they own the entire power network. Every pole and wire, whether above or below ground, every generator, every, everything is owned by the Chinese. Same, I believe, in South

Australia. At least... The ethnic Chinese are Chinese nationals, Chinese government PLAs? Well, as far as where it goes, but it tracks back into a private company in China. Now, what is that? I don't know. I haven't done enough digging into that, but there's a lot less

divide between public and private in a country like China. That's a problem. Who made that fucking decision? You know? So there's a lot of that. And their fingers are in pies. I've spoken about the threat of, you know, we see Ukraine with the Operation Spider Web with the drones taking out the bombers, to get about a dozen bombers, say.

That was Ukraine doing that, you know, in a country that is looking specifically for intelligence operations, being Russia, because they're at war with them, you don't think that if there was an incident like that China could wipe out every bomber in 10 minutes with cells or somewhere. And I'm not saying that they've got them already to do them, but I'm saying that we need to look across and go, what actually is the threat here, or what is potentially being enabled by this too? And it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's just politics where you have to look and we have to realize, is China a threat or are they not?

Are they a threat to Russia at all? Because, of course, yes. Now, Biden, Biden would say this all the time, and I think he was parroting William Burns, because Burns, you know, this was his point of view. And this is something that I had read about back in the 1990s. Like, from the Chinese point of view, boy, that Siberia sure is unpopulated and full of resources. Maybe we just take that. So I wonder, putting yourself in she's shoes, do you think that they just would rather value a close relationship with Moscow? Or that, do you think they might be willing to risk it by going ahead and take, I mean, Moscow are like H-bombs, right? So what the hell are they going to do in vain?

They'll just, it's cheap and easy to just work with them. It's cheaper and easier just to pay a rate on gas and oil than to fucking invade and take it. You know, like, it's just cheaper and easier to do it. Because Biden would say, you know, that like, oh, Russia can't move east toward China. They're relying on the West and they have to do whatever we say because of this factor. They're worried that the Chinese are going to come and take Siberia from. So they need us more than we need them and this kind of thing. But look, that seemed to be, especially listening to an idiot like Joe Biden say it,

it seemed to be something that, like, he heard somebody say once. You know what I mean? And he's like, oh, yeah, that's the thing. I heard somebody say that once too a long time ago. And obviously, China is adjacent to Siberia and there's gold and then there are hills, but would it be worth it in a thousand years to try it? Look, China and Russia have a partnership that is beneficial to both of them, and I think that they'd look to maintain the status quo, that Russia will go, look, we're selling a shitload

of stuff to you, you're paying us a shitload of money for it. What this is doing is now the gas that... And they both have capable nuclear deterrence, too, right? The gas we used to sell to Europe to fund their industry that they paid us for. now Europe's industry is fucked and we're still receiving that money but from you. We're happy with that.

Like, countries want to, I don't believe that countries are all out there wanting just to cross borders and start war and kill men. Countries want to just maintain status quo as much as they can. It's when someone starts trying to move that

that you go, what the fuck are you doing and you have to hammer down the nail that sticks up? And while Russia is getting a fucking billions of roubles from China, and China's receiving barrels of oil by the fucking, by as many as they want, why do anything? And I think that that relationship will maintain and it will chop and change as it needs, but movement across borders that way. And what would it take for America, what would America have to offer Russia to come back to us

and cut those relationships off? This far down the line, I don't know. I don't know if there's anything. China is the biggest beneficiary of the war in Ukraine by a mile. They haven't, we've used a buckload of everything, shells, some of our own guys who have dollars, dollars, everything. You know, so the, and Russia's used a shitload. So China still need to consider a Russia may be a friendly nation to them, but it's still

a nation with a very big military and fucking atomic bombs on their border. China still need to consider Russia's a very powerful country. What this war has done is it's used up. a shitload of American munitions, shitload of Russian munitions, China, they've done nothing. They've just sat there and growing their industry. And it shrunk Europe's ability to industrialize.

So it's shrunk Europe, shrunk America, shrunk Russia. China's sitting there going like, fantastic. Overall, the Russian military has grown quite a bit and we'll stay more militarized now compared to before, right? Absolutely. But as far as cost in this, it has cost a lot. So China, it's like-

And they still have economic health to pay in, you know, from whatever barrowing or whatever. Of all this, yeah. Post-war attrition will be, it will be, it will be mild to catastrophic. We will see. Again, China won't let Russia fail. That is a big bit in this, because they can't let them fail. It would be, that would be catastrophic for China.

Because we got away with the collapse of the Soviet Union by the fucking skin of our teeth. Very lucky that there wasn't bombs flying, okay? No one wants to risk that again. including America, and I've said this, that America will give Ukraine enough to hold the Russians back and will sanction Russia enough to, you know, put the clutch in on their industry a bit. They'll never do enough to win, like Ukraine,

to win victorious on the battlefield, or to collapse the economy because no one knows what happens then. No one fucking knows what occurs then. And same to China. They don't want that. In American China, they're going, We may not like what's happening in Ukraine, but you know it's a lot worse for us. Russia falling apart.

That's a fuckload worse. And having someone, like, is better the devil you know? We know Putin. She knows Putin. Trump knows Putin. And that is one of the big problems in Ukraine. This is why I've been highly critical of the war following post-2020. And especially post-23 counter-offensive was, it's very obvious now that the West isn't going

to give enough for you to win, isn't actually giving enough for you to stabilize. What you were doing is just detriting your men. That's what's occurring and that is catastrophic. And commanders who launch wars without the ability to war for go being commanders and start becoming butchers. And when I say command, I'm not just talking Ukrainian command because they don't have any other choice. What are they going to do not?

It's Europeans and Americans continuing to push this as well. And this bullshit rhetoric of, we give you a few more billion and you'll win. And they're telling the Ukrainian this too. We'll give you a five more billion and you'll win. No, you won't. There's a new article like that in foreign policy yesterday. It's devastating. And we talk about post-war attrition of the Russian economy and even Russian males that have died, you know, probably mid-100,000 or so. But Ukraine has suffered significant loss, if not very similar loss in a much, much smaller

nation with a fertility rate that is catastrophic, but also a country where immigration, leaving is huge, huge. All the women have left. Like, what happens after this and as I've said is I agree that borders and sovereignty is incredibly important of territorial sovereignty. But you know what is more important than that for a state is the people within it. America, first and foremost, is Americans. Secondly, is your international recognized borders. And Australia is the same. And I've said this about Ukraine. I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's just. But I will sacrifice a part of my land for the survival of my people. And what Russia is doing is trying to take some of your land and are tritting

your people. But at the same time, Europe is funding a war. They are not willing to give you enough to win, not even stabilise. And Europe is dragging their feet on fucking everything on this to extend someone they say a historic enemy at the expense of your people

at the expense of your state and there will there is already and it will grow rapidly anti-Western rhetoric in Ukraine

it's fucking huge of course Nazis love a good stab in the back story and we gave them one but it's not it's not even just Nazi

it's not these you know these minor extremist groups that exist it's people going hang on You, you, like, it's average Ukrainians who are just getting by in life, who were there going,

you stand up, Macron, or whoever, and say, whatever it takes, however long it takes. Right. Now, it's not whatever, I haven't seen a single French Leclerc tank there. I haven't seen any Raphael Jets. Like, it's rhetoric-first reality is what I find disgusting. And the rhetoric is, hey, what the fuck is this? It's not meaning that these people are going to. which shouldn't be pro-Russian, but it means that it's going to be pretty fucking

rough afterwards going like, you fucked us, you said you'd support us, you said this, we're not getting into NATO, our country's been obliterated, eventually they're going to start looking for people that have been emigrated into Europe and send them back or whatever. Like, and you're going to go, but you are the ones who have also been pushing this too from pre-war into the war. There's a lot of, a lot of problems in this, and I see that this is a real turning point for Europe. Hey, y'all, if you run a business or a side hustle and want to keep more of your money

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questions. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, no, place. Now, one of my things is that I believe that Trump was in Syria wanted to end the war, but he just got re-inogorated for his second term at just the wrong time because the Russians have claimed these four provinces, but as you

stipulated, they don't control them all yet. Do you agree with the analysis of Daniel Davis and others that the Russians are not really trying to take territory. That's secondary compared to they're trying to move very slow and just chew up their opposition with artillery. This is how you win a traditional war, yeah. But the problem being then that when Trump comes in, they're still far from their officially stated goal, which is the line way over there that they haven't reached yet.

And so now Trump just can't get them to come to the table because Putin's just not really willing to quit yet. And then secondary to that, after you could talk about that, because as we talked about the percentages that they control of Donetsk Zaproja and curse on there and the other side of the river and all that. But then there's the obvious question. Once they take all of Lujansk, Kharkiv's right there. That's historically Russian city. They're going to go ahead and take Kharkiv? And then the same thing for Odessa. That's the jewel of the Black Sea.

And to take it away from Ukraine would be... Odessa is catastrophic. Ultimate catastrophe. Ukraine. The Ukraine's a state does not exist. And yet, if you look at the map, though, once you control all of Kersan, and then if you did move to Odessa, well, then it's just a hop and a skip over to Transnistria, which would make sense from the massive Soviet sockpile of weapons. And a Russian population under Russian military protection now, as this sort of frozen conflict, mini-state. This is, for people who don't know, this is the Moldovan side of the river. on the Moldovan-Ukrainian border is this little strip of land, Transnistria or Transnistur there. And so it would make military sense then that, hey, as long as we're going this far, we're going this far. But then that could take, I don't know how many years.

And I know, I don't know if you know about this, but at least I'm told that there's a pretty severe tunnel network under Odessa. No, there is. The KGB used it back in the day. Okay. So this would be, you know, very conducive to... So, Odessa has... Odessa has unbelievable underground areas that have been there. Unbelievable ones, great.

So, do you think the Russians are going that for? No, but it may. Like, I don't think Odessa is realistic at this point in time. But what we don't know is we don't know, to answer your first question in this, we don't actually know the attrition rate of Ukraine or Russia, okay? we have pretty good numbers. Don't believe the MODs. No shit. Um, but UA losses who count obituaries and so does media zone. Pretty good. They might be 10 or 20% off, but even if it's 10 or 20% off, well, if Russia is 20% more than Ukraine, that's not a problem. We've got four times

the population. Not only four times the population, but Russia's having a 10 times easier recruiting drive than Ukraine is. Ukraine was bragged. about recruiting a few hundred people in a recent drive. I'm sorry to interpret it's thought here, but yeah. I'm told like the standard is the assaulting army has an attrition rate of three times as much as the defenders. And then obviously in this case, that's going to be skewed because of the strategy and the tactics on the ground and whatever. So the reality of what that is, this gets taken by people on Twitter and used as a rule of thumb for losses. Yeah.

That's not what it is. The rule of thumb, the three to one rule of thumb, is what you want to assault with, not what your losses will be. So if there's a village of 10 Taliban, we want to fight with 30, so we want three to one advantage on the ground. That does not mean that we take three times the Kaz. No, no, no, not at all. It just means we want that advantage.

That is optimal advantage for offensive warfare. Now, this number increases and decreases, of course, with the skill of your enemy, your air power, your artillery power, can skews. that massively. And it's a rule of thumb for being a rule of thumb. We want three to one. Yeah. You know. But as far as losses, it doesn't mean that at all. The losses in war traditionally has been artillery. That's it. And I actually, unlike most people, I guess, I say you've got rotary, barrel, glide artillery. I do not consider drones to be their own

form of warfare. Drones, in my opinion, FPVs, and drone drop. munitions. They're another form of artillery. It is, you know, 10 to 15 kilometers used as guided artillery. So I classified as artillery with which Russia have had parity for most of the war and superiority in drones now. Barrel artillery. Russia has had massive superiority, the entire conflict of barrel, like by a fucking, minimum has been two to one. Like, you're talking minimum. And then glide artillery is like a glide bombs, which Ukraine has no, nothing close to. It's like JDM kits fit on old Soviet bombs. Yes. And they've just got a million of these bombs. They're cheapest fuck to make from 250 kilograms up to three tons. And they're a

devastating weapon. And they're used basically as massive artillery. It's devastating. And for my Ukrainian friends are fighting. It's not just the devastation of the bomb. It's the psychological impact of these two. It's fucking, because nothing can shoot them down. Because he can't wait a $2 million missile on a $20,000 fucking bomb that they're dropping 50 of a day. Psychologically, it's a fucking nightmare. And Russia's had either parity or advantage in all of those three aspects, the entire war.

So to now say that the Russians are taking 10 times the casualties is ridiculous. Is there some, as people will say, ethnic difference in Russians and Ukrainians to be able to fight and warriors on the front line? No. There's not. Training difference? Well, uh, okay, NATO standard training, Ukraine's never received NATO standard

training. The timeframes people spoke about, Australia's not a NATO country, but we are at the NATO standard or at above or above. Well, you, that takes, as I said in the beginning, 18 months to really get there of time in units and times on courses and all the, they didn't receive that. The best trained was in 2023 and it got fucking hammered. Right. The training now, though, Russians, let's just go to the Russian casualties in the front line of one to one of the Ukrainians. Let's say they're losing the same amount. But let's say Russia's recruiting, let's say five times the amount. That means their training pipeline can be significantly more normal than Ukraine's is. So you've got high morale, you've got better training,

and you've got artillery parity. So this idea to say that now on the front line Russia is taking 10 times casualties is fucking ridiculous. There may have been times when that was the case, when you're grinding down in areas. It's likely going to be maybe higher because of offensive warfare. But you know what doesn't happen on, like an offensive around Avdivkia? Is you don't get surrounded,

cut off and left in the village and heaps of people fucking die. So that three to one rule that people use, yeah, but sometimes in defensive warfare, you lose a catastrophic amount of soldiers like that, that Avdivka or Madayupil gets surrounded. Yes, the Russians, so we need to remember the battle, the time of battle, people believe, is when the Russians enter Madhopal

to when Mariupil falls. That's not the length of battle. The length of battle is when they start working on the flanks, when they start pushing in. It's not first troop entering to last one out. In that part, okay, when the first Russian Wagner PMC guy entered Bakhmut to Ukraine withdrawing, Ukraine probably suffered less casualties at that point. But that's taking a small bit of the battle for Buckmood. It's taking the first guy entering.

What you haven't considered is for the two months prior, Russian artillery hammered that fucking position every single day to no Russian losses. Like if Russia's firing artillery from 30Ks back on an area, they're losing fuck all guys from that. So in the entire battle sequence, so yes, the offensive action right at the end to take the city is the last step in 10 steps of warfare.

Those first nine steps, they're probably at parity or less guys, and the end set they probably take more when you have storm troops moving into an area, okay? And at the moment, let's talk Pokrovsk. When that's the next city, the major area, about to be enveloped by the Russians. Right now, there's no way the Russians are taking more casualties around there than the Ukrainians. The front line's not moving. They're just hammering the fucking area with glide bombs, artillery and drones to very few Russian losses back the other way. when the Russians enter Pockroves, they will likely take more ground losses.

But like I'm saying, is that's the last sequence in the battle order. So we need to look at that entire battle order and this gives us attritional war to go back to your first point about is the Russians goal here land?

Yes, but it's not their primary goal. The goal of attritional warfare is to at treats your enemy. And if that means... Are you surprised that the Ukrainian army is still standing because we're recording this three and a half years into the war.

The Ukraine army has done an unbelievable job. Yeah, like, There are a lot of skeptics who assume, I mean, I know that the CIA official assessment was that the Russians would smash them and their military would lose immediately. But there have been a hell of a lot of critics and analysts who have thought that they were going to essentially dissolve many times over the years here. I was in the Donbass when the war started and I thought the Russian tanks would be there in two hours. Do you have any, does anybody know, and obviously it's secret, but there's got to be some indication like how many units, how many brigades, how many men do they have? still to fight with. I don't know.

There's very little reserve. I know that. If you're ripping people off the street, not great. If you have got guys who have been, had no rotation on the front line for years. Am I right that they just finally lowered the conscription age all the way to 18 now? Oh, I haven't seen that unless it was today. No, no, no.

I thought I had heard that last week. No, I don't believe so. They may have moved it for people that have served previously. There's little bits and pieces, but as far as I still believe it's 25. I shouldn't have brought that. I did not read that at answer. or something. I just saw that on my phone somewhere while I was flying around.

You do see this. That it's like if you have served previously, you may be conscripted down to 18. So that's where that is coming from, I'd guess. So you're not actually incorrect. But we do know the Ukrainian manpower problem is growing more and more severe daily. Like it is, it's too obvious to hide now. It's catastrophic.

And this is a traditional warfare. And what I say, traditional warfare, I always use, and you've probably heard me use an analogy, it's bankruptcy. It's bankruptcy from gambling. That when you gamble and eventually go bankrupt from it is, it's little by little. And then all at once, and you've lost your house and you're homeless. But you don't lose your house and your wife and your kids and your car. It doesn't like, oh, you lose one and then you lose. No, no, you fall off a fucking cliff.

And that is how tritional warfare works. It's bankruptcy. That it's little, you don't really notice next thing, you fall off a fucking cliff. And what I've said is the European policy can't let that cliff fall. Because if that cliff falls and you can't stop it, the Russians won't stop at the Frob Blasts. You need to fucking stop it either militarily or diplomatically before Ukraine falls off a cliff. And we are getting closer and closer to that cliff drop. Absolutely.

And it'll be, and this is attritional warfare. The reason attritional warfare works well, is because the nature of savagery of attrition, okay? The best example, I guess, is World War II with the Germans occupying France and having a lot of resistance because they took it very quickly and the Soviets taking Berlin because they took it very fucking slowly

and killed fucking everyone. This is where attritional nature of war works for the Russians because it's fucking brutal. Is you kill everyone. Because you're moving forward at a, you know, half mile a day, you don't get pockets of resistance behind the line because people flee, like the pro-Ukrainians in its town flee, the pro-Russians are left behind, or a lot of the civilians die because the town's getting bombed to fuck by the Russians, and then once the Russians take it, the Ukrainians

bomb it to fuck. And you don't end up with troops or resistance on the front? So why do you think we don't see that much internal resistance in the occupied territories? This is where attritional warfare, I hate attritional warfare because it's fucking, it's fucked, because everyone fucking dies. But this is where it works, is you don't get then pockets of resistance because everyone's fucking dead. Those that would resist have been killed.

This is where, if you wanted Afghanistan to not end up like we do, you don't go in there and do maneuver warfare operations and target the Taliban here, targets, hello, no, no, no. We move from one border through the canation and kill every one who gives any resistance. That's how you win, win like that without pockets, resistance, and a hand back to the Taliban. Iran would have to do the same fucking thing. Otherwise, it'll end up catastrophic, and we can't do that. And that's where attritional warfare became the Russia's number one goal is not territory because they'll go, we'll take the territory through attrition.

We'll trick the forces down. This is where Russia is more happy to move rearwoods than Ukraine is. Ukraine doesn't want to move rearwards, like do a withdrawal, even if it's tactically the right move. Because their number one goal is territory. Russia's number one goal is attrition. So Russia will happily, like right now, there's area between, what I call the Pishani Front, which meets then a river, and a front line coming in, then Russia's having developed this area, but it's got a waterway, so there's a 10-kilometer

gap, which is six miles, to move through. And what I've said is, the Russians have no want at all to close that gap, because Ukraine is moving troops through that gap, and they just want to treat you. They've created a killbox in that gap. They'll leave that gap open. What we've seen, they haven't moved at all to close that gap. And what we've actually seen is Ukraine, then, in the envelopment, have advances. And everyone's going on this because You know, the Russians are withdrawing in there to draw more of your shitting because they want to atreat you. This is the problem when you've got different goals. Russia want to destroy Ukraine's capability.

Ukraine want to take back their territory. And the problem is by taking back territory, you actually increase their goal of attrition. This is why it's so fucking difficult. And this is where if you're dealing with a quarter or a third of the population, it's a fucking push and shit uphill. And Russia's... And the Ukrainians have no hope, right, of changing their strategy to just doing attrition themselves and trying to destroy the Russian army itself because that will work because they're just outnumbered, right?

So in other words, fighting for the land is the best chance they got. So I somewhat disagree. If your goal was survival of the state, regardless of the borders, okay, problem is the problem that I've seen in Ukraine is that all the statesmen and all the officials, everyone, has pushed on 1991 borders. What they should have done, and this, you know, it's easy for me to sit here and say. But if they said, our goal is the survival of the state,

and that is victory, okay? Victory for Ukraine and this war, in my opinion, if Ukraine survive and remain the capital of Kiev, that's a win for Ukraine. It may also be a win for Russia because they take some areas, but if you go up against a country four times your fucking size and survive in any way, that should be a victory.

The problem is the goal post-Ukraine has put is 1991 borders. Any inch less is a loss. So they're now not willing to do what would be the correct strategy of withdraw and a trick to increase cost to the Russians. They'll say they're doing it, but they're not. You hear guys all the time on the front line saying we need to withdraw and we can't. We're not allowed to withdraw. Okay, but so now back to my earlier question, when they go off the cliff and the Ukrainian army

finally breaks. Are the Russians go into Harkiv? Are they going to take, I can never say it right, Deepernos, provost. Nipo Petrovsk.

Yeah, there you go, that one, which is for everyone, that's between Kiev and the Donbass and still predominantly Russian speakers.

And so if we're taking all this, we can't just leave them mind, right? So this is the problem. Same thing with Odessa and the southern coast there is when it's that easy,

especially once, assuming that at some point in the next year or whatever, the Ukrainian military finally falls apart, then just how big of an appetite does Moscow have then, do you think? So let's step back. The reason Putin, actually I sort of missed a question there about why is Trump having a problem ending this war? Because Putin smells blood in the water.

Because Putin, Russia actually, Russia is incredibly experienced at attritional warfare, protracted warfare. Look at how the Russians fought Napoleon. Look at how the Soviets fought the Nazis. That is catastrophic initial loss, recovery, attrition protraction. That is like Russian warfare fucking 101. And Ukraine, I tell you, fuck it follows their history of catastrophic initial loss, two years of recovery, massive attrition on the front line.

Everyone thought they failed, Napoleon thought it had failed, Hitler thought they'd failed that, oh, there's no way they can recover from these loss. We said the same fucking thing and they've recovered from the loss, okay? So the reason Trump is having no luck is because Putin smells blood in the water and he's going, hang on. But we get the bankruptcy idea and we know Ukraine themselves are complaining about not having enough people and that you're not giving weapons. Why would we negotiate now? Why would you, why would you, if...

So I'll ask you this question, just a yes or no. Will Russia be in a better position on the battlefield in six months than they are today? Okay. If your answer is yes, that question, why would you? Why would he negotiate it? That was the way I framed it was Trump just got inaugurated at the wrong time to end this thing, right? He wants to. I think he's really sincere about it.

But Putin is going, no, I'm winning. He'll go, he'll go, I will, but I want all of that. I will, but I'll take this. Well, in fact, that was his demand, right? Was the Ukrainians have to withdraw entirely from Curzon and Zeproja and Doniesk, which they're never going to do, of course, right? Yeah, but it is either they do it or we'll take it. Yeah.

And that's the way it is. And when we should have got the Russians was when Ukraine was having success at the end of 22. That was the point we should have gone. Now we, this is where we go, hey, Russia, we're going to negotiate because you're having problems. And you're going to either spend another fucking... Which is what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff versus the former Mike Mullen and then the current... Exactly what they said. Mark Millie said, hey, this is as good as it gets.

Let's quit while you boys are only this far behind and not more. Yes. And then, you know, we all knew this at the time. I don't know exactly how we knew or we just guessed, but the Times later confirmed. And they did a story called Secretary of War about Anthony Blinken. And it was about how the State Department weenies overruled the generals and said, these army guys don't know what they're talking about. Ukraine can win.

So this is one of the biggest problem in command everywhere, is you cannot let your state propaganda influence command. This is a huge problem. is in Ukraine and America and whoever is involved in this site, they're starting to sort of believe their own Kool-Aid. State propaganda is super important. Optics are so important in war, especially in Democratic states, okay? But what you need is you need your commanders,

you need them to be able to see through their own optic, okay? You can't have them drinking the Kool-Aid too. So you want the public to be believing your bullshit, okay? But you need your commanders to go, yeah, yeah, okay, we know the public belief. that, but this is what we're doing. So, okay, the public believe Ukraine's going to win. So we'll keep that going. We keep that propaganda. So they'll keep paying taxes and fund $100 billion more. The commanders, they need to go, look, we know they're not going to have

victory on the battlefield. So that $100 billion, we're going to spend to a trip the Russians and get into a position to stabilize it. Problem is, the command, especially in Ukraine, they started believing their own propaganda of, oh, sweet. We are going to have military success, victory here and optics propaganda drove command and then command failed. And that is, that is what we have seen. And Kersk is a great example of this. There's many other areas that are a great example of that. You can't believe your own bullshit. And you know that one of the biggest issues here, you cannot criticize Ukraine at all. You can't criticize any tactics, any strategy, any politics, nothing. If you criticize it, you are Vladimir Putin's best mate. The problem is,

if you get rid of any criticism, then why would they not run with the optics of the day? That's the problem. Back to if the falls off a cliff, what then occurs? Well, it was, to me, the biggest thing we can't let the Russians do is Soviet doctrine of deep maneuver warfare, where they have armored vehicles maneuvering under artillery fire, deep, you know, Artie 30 kilometres, you know, what's that, 20 miles deep, same. Can't let that happen. That's catastrophic because once they reintroduced manoeuvre into the battlefield,

problem. There's no manoeuvre at the moment, really. But we believe NATO Chief Mark Root, where he's saying Russia has 3,000 tanks sitting there. It looks like they want to reintroduce armoured maneuver warfare into the battlefield, but are waiting for the right time. Russia's basically not using fucking tanks on the battlefield right now. but it's still producing a fucking shitload of tanks and armored vehicles.

And people are going, that's weird. Why aren't they using them? Because at this point in time, it makes no sense to have tanks on the front line due to the nature and saturation of drones and artillery, etc. But if you can reintroduce maneuver warfare, armoured, deep maneuver, it makes sense. So it looks like they're waiting for that drop, and then they'll start moving. And we don't have negotiating power at that point. if the only piece we have at that point is physical barriers okay and the physical barrier

Ukraine doesn't have great mountain ranges or an inland sea what it has is the Nipra river and this is where many people especially people behind the scenes have said the war will continue until it meets something that it cannot cross and that people are saying it could go all the way to the Nipra River and split Ukraine in half. what would be catastrophic, it would be significantly worse than the deal that's on the table, but you only have cards, the cards in your hand are only worth anything if you play them. And currently we are not playing any of the cards that Ukraine actually has, which it does have cards on the table.

And we, yeah, that's the biggest thing I say is if we can't let the Russians have a breakthrough. I'm going to say we can't let them, or meaning like the West. and policy if we want Ukraine to walk away from this. And it's looking daily, I look at the map thinking this could be any day. This falls off a cliff. And next thing you have, you know, Russia's makes, you know, say 20 kilometers squares a day. What we can't do, you think it's hard to get them to negotiate now. What if they're making 200 a day?

What if they start having real success in areas? They're going to go, fuck your, fuck your negotiations. They already don't want it. And they didn't want negotiations when they're bogs down in a, nutritional war. If they reintroduced a maneuver into the battlefield, they just smell blood, smell blood, smell blood. Okay, but so if my worst sort of hypothetical were to follow here, and they decide we want our key, we want everything east of the river, we want the whole southern coast all the way to Transnistria, and we're going to lead this tiny little rump Ukraine with

its capital in Lviv or what have you, then they've created a new set of problems for themselves then, because now they have, they used to have a country where half the people were sort of favored Russia. Now they have a country where nobody does anymore on their border and where the worst kind of right-wing nationalists and Andrew Belletsky and his Nazi buddies are going to be war heroes at the end of this thing from the third separate infantry division and all that. So now they're going to have a rump Ukraine run by the radical right and then a question will be whether they want to just go ahead and keep going and just scatter those people to the winds and march all the way to Poland or what?

The thing is, yeah. If you look at that, let's say that they take the whole southern coasts all this and declare victory. Yeah. Now they got a brand new problem in whatever you call the rump Ukrainian state there. This is the nature of a traditional war, though, is that those resistance elements, like your far right wing elements and this and that, they're the ones also fighting too. Like, like your original as-of brigade that's now the third assault. most of those hardcore guys in the beginning, they're dead or captured.

Right. Like, this goes back to why the Russians in history will go, actually attritional nature of war was the better option there, long term. I'm talking after post-war attrition, so, you know, a couple of decades on. Because they'll go, if we won by maneuver, if the Russians won on their original plan of, you know,

coming into Kiev and coming out to Heron and maneuvering their way around the battlefield and, you know, blockading areas and taking it, then, yeah, Russia would have had resistance fucking everywhere. But the way they're fighting, by grinding, is, well, no one's volunteering to fight in Ukraine, okay? So the only, the new soldiers by, you know, one's had no one, very few are volunteering at this point.

So they're all conscription. Well, if someone hasn't volunteered in three and a half years of war, do you really think they're going to be resistance after the war? No. What you want is you kill everyone who would be resistance. So your young nationalistic men all are dead. That's why there was no Nazi resistance after the, so they fucking killed everyone who's going to be resistance. On mass, at least, I should say. And this is why a traditional nature of war, you won't end up with, if the Russians continue, with that amount of resistance. So you end up with this grind forward, all those passionate young guys, nationalistic, whatever you want to say. they end up dead or captured.

Although all the forests and swamps are in the west of the country, right? So there's at least more hospitable terrain. I don't think the Russians want to take the west of the country. No, but that's what I'm saying, though, is they're going to have it left. And then what, though, right? Because you could still have insurgencies based out of there. Yeah, yeah. And you can still have, well, I don't know.

You will, you will, you're probably going to have insurgency. But then I have even speculated the idea that I think NATO will deploy troops into what's left of Ukraine to try and clear up insurgency. I've floated this idea of, let's say the war ends tomorrow along the lines that we've currently gone. Okay? What happens in war is you don't re-de-radicalize elements. You further radicalize elements.

That every single Hamas killer, sorry, every single Hamas soldier that Israel has killed, has radicalized two or three, either within Gaza or around the world. Okay, that's what happens. you radicalize, especially when we're talking insurgency. Do you really think that NATO or the EU is going to keep that on their border with these radical elements that have been armed when there's now anti-Western rhetoric in this too? So this is why I floated.

I was going to say, although just footnote here, the CIA backed the Nazis in Ukraine in the Carpathian Mountains through 1959 before they finally. gave that up. And knowing that they were going to lose all along, but just helping to weaken the Russians. And this was Khrushchev's great victory to help propel him to succeed. Stalin was when he had finished. And how many times do we end up fighting someone at some point that we have,

like how often do we end up fighting an enemy of which we have funded? Oh, all the time. Decades down the line. So this is what I'm saying is Bill Hicks joke 30 years ago about that. I've said this before, and I'll say it again, if the line, say the war ended tomorrow, Russia goes, let's pause on these lines. Okay.

Okay, and then Ukraine, we want Ukraine in the EU. We want Ukraine in NATO. Let's say Russia agrees to that. Let's just go, they agree. Is Ukraine in its current state going to be allowed with the militarization and radicalization of a large amount of people in the country into those? No, because there's going to be, so these extremist groups, let's take, just take one that is a nationalistic element.

Yes, they have anti-Russian rhetoric. But they also are developing huge anti-Western rhetoric due to the Westragging their feet. Yeah. As we said earlier in the podcast, people are a reflection of what's around them. Okay? Well, I could honestly see a peacekeeping force or peacekeeping, deploying into Ukraine from NATO to say, well, you can join NATO, but you can't have this. And I think that we could see Ukrainian military or Western military deployed to get rid of some of these elements,

because these elements are incredibly powerful now. These aren't rag-tag insurgents with, you know, a couple of AKs and maybe a couple of stingers. No, no, no. These guys have fought for three years. They're hardened fucking warriors who have experiencing conventional warfare. And they, well, there's few things. They're very anti-Russian, but they're very anti-Western modernity as well.

So it's a fucking weird mix. And Ukrainian government and Ukrainian population, the majority of Ukraine's population, will be against them holding up them into the EU or NATO too. So, you know, if you're, you and me, say, if we're sitting in Kiev and we're just regular blokes, we would go, hey, those guys, yet they were heroes when they were fighting Russia for us. But now that unit is stopping us joining NATO, the EU.

Yeah. We need to fucking get rid of that unit, whether by one means or another. Yeah. That's going to be a fucking, no one, very few people are actually considering what that looks like after the war with these radical elements, because a lot of these elements, they know they can't exist. innate on the EU as well. Right.

They don't want to exist. It's going to get, it's going to, even when the guns, the Russian guns fall silent, it's going to get messy on the other side of that with clearing. We, we, we, we, it's very easy to turn a blind eye to a unit that's fighting on your side. Even if they're not fighting back against you, if they are stopping movement towards a coalition of some point or whatever, it's, it's. going to be a problem. It's going to be a real problem. Yeah. All right. I think we should leave it here. We're in two and a half hours. I want to make sure that people want to listen to the whole thing.

Thanks for having me. And this has been so great. And I hope we can continue this over the wires from the other side of the planet when you go back home. Can we wrap up on just a quick question of how is your health doing? I know people who care about you care very much. I hope they do. The latest. So no more recent update. I had an MRI scan about four weeks ago that showed no changes on the tumour, which is good. For those who are unaware, I have a brain tumour. This is the scar down my fucking head was from my biopsy. I'm on chemotherapy at the moment. I've been off for a couple of weeks now. And then I have two more rounds of chemo than another scan. And we're hoping to see, the problem with the tumour is the tumour is just all mixed in with good brain matter.

what we want the chemo to do is really separate that so they can start removing parts without having neurological deficit. Because right now the tumour and my motor strip controls my right arm, that's just all is one. So it's too dangerous to them to remove. The problem is with a tumour like this, is it also, even if they cut it all out, it will still grow back and sometimes grows back in a high grade. So there's a lot of problems with anything there of, and there's even,

Discussion between my surgeons being like, well, are we better off removing it? Because it can come back. Like, these can almost have like a intelligence of their own. They're a real pain. But my health realistically is very good. Taking all things into account, it's good. So I can continue working. I get a bit of brain fog from the chemo and whatever.

So I lose track of a bit of conversation and stuff here and there. But otherwise, pretty good. And I can work through it and go from there. And in the States for a couple of weeks for a wedding and hanging out with you. everything that's great well it's awesome man sure i'm happy to have you here i'm glad to hear that you're hanging in there and and i think you said too that he's in a in a video and you told me earlier today too right that the the latest scan showed that it was shrinking a little bit look by everyone's eyes who have looked at it it looks like it's shrinking uh and speaking to

my oncologist he said it probably has shrunk a little bit but some of the surgeons won't say that unless it's had a measurable it needs to be more than a millimeter or something before they can that. But anyone else's eyes, it looks like there's less pressure on the surrounding tissue. So, we'll see. We'll see. Hang in there, huh? Hang in there, buddy. All right.

Easy. Thank you, brother. All right. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton Show, which can be heard on APS Radio News at Scotthorton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.org.